I Knew a Phoenix, Sketches for an Autobiography
As a nucleus for this absorbing book, Miss Sarton recalls her Belgian childhood; from these roots, which she has remembered with love, she traces the beginnings of a search for her world.
Many people and events had their share of influence: her father, the late George Sarton, brilliant historian of science; her English mother, an artist in many ways, not the least of which was her devotion to her family; the wonderful unique experience at Sandy Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the rewarding apprenticeship at Eva Le Gallienne's Repertory Theatre in New York; and Miss Sartons' three-year experiment with a young theatrical company of her own. The theater was not to be her medium, but from these experiences the writer was being fashioned; her first book of poems appeared when the was twenty-four.
In the last part of the book, May Sarton tells of two spring visits to England, when her education was completed by a series of crucial encounters with Virginia Woolf, S.S. Koteliansky, and others from that vanished prewar world.
As a nucleus for this absorbing book, Miss Sarton recalls her Belgian childhood; from these roots, which she has remembered with love, she traces the beginnings of a search for her world.
Many people and events had their share of influence: her father, the late George Sarton, brilliant historian of science; her English mother, an artist in many ways, not the least of which was her devotion to her family; the wonderful unique experience at Sandy Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the rewarding apprenticeship at Eva Le Gallienne's Repertory Theatre in New York; and Miss Sartons' three-year experiment with a young theatrical company of her own. The theater was not to be her medium, but from these experiences the writer was being fashioned; her first book of poems appeared when the was twenty-four.
In the last part of the book, May Sarton tells of two spring visits to England, when her education was completed by a series of crucial encounters with Virginia Woolf, S.S. Koteliansky, and others from that vanished prewar world.
