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Description
May Sarton's powerful and profound novel of an extraordinary life, and of one woman's efforts to preserve the force and vitality of her experiences on the pages of a book For the second time in my life--and I am now seventy--I am embarking on an effort which may well come to nothing but which has possessed my mind, haunts, and will not let me sleep. From her opening statement, Cam, the narrator of The Magnificent Spinster, declares her grand intentions: to write a novel--a worthy and important one in celebration of her recently deceased friend and teacher, Jane Reid, whose dearth of family threatens the memory of her almost tangible greatness. And so she writes, re-creating Jane's childhood, adolescence, and years as a teacher--including the one in which Cam was her student. She writes of Jane's irrepressible spirit and the charming letters Jane penned about her adventures, and she recounts Jane's growing isolation as she aged, which, rather than softening her, only made her shine brighter. Raw, warm, and beautifully rendered, The Magnificent Spinster is a stunning achievement--part memoir, part epistolary recollection, and part novel within a novel about friendship, memory, and the power of a brilliant soul.… (more)
User reviews
I’m not sure what to make of this book, which I picked up on a whim several years ago and left to languish on my shelves. The premise is interesting, but ultimately I wasn’t as fascinated by Jane as Cam was. May Sarton used major political and world events to anchor her story (both world wars, the Spanish Civil War, McCarthyism, the Kennedy presidency, and so on), but I grew weary of the characters’ diatribes on the state of the world.
In the end, this was a “just okay” sort of read. And now it’s no longer languishing on my shelves, so there’s that, I guess.