Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
It is a rare gift to meet, much less befriend, one of your heroes — a gift that fell upon the American poet, novelist, and diarist extraordinaire May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) in her mid-twenties, just as she was starting out as a writer, when she met
On a visit to England shortly after her literary debut, the young Sarton decided to leave a copy of her first poetry collection at Woolf’s doorstep, along with some flowers.
To her surprise, the kindly maid opened the door and invited her in. Unprepared for the fortuitous opportunity to meet her idol, Sarton mumbled a polite declination, handed the maid the book, and walked away.Knowing how desperately Sarton wanted to meet Woolf, the prominent writer Elizabeth Bowen took it upon herself to stage a more planned introduction. She decided to invite both Woolf and the young poet to dinner at her country house in Ireland — an epicenter of the era’s creative community, where she hosted such titans of literature as Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Iris Murdoch.
In The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the 20th Century’s Preeminent Writers (public library) — the wonderful 1989 collection of wisdom from Paris Review interviews, which also gave us great writers on how to handle criticism and James Baldwin’s advice on writing — Sarton recounts the moment Woolf entered, a strange and stunning vision:
She walked in, in a “robe de style,” a lovely, rather eighteenth-century-looking, long dress with a wide collar, and she came into the room like a dazzled deer and walked right across — this was a beautiful house on Rogent’s Park — to the long windows and stood there looking out.
My memory is…
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