Find Similar Books - I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography by May Sarton

I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography

by May Sarton

Summary

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 her father, the late George Sarton, brillant 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 Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the rewarding apprenticeship at Eva Le Gallienne's Repertory Theatre in New York; and Miss Sarton's three-year experiment with a young theatrical company of her own. The theatre was not to be her medium, but from these experiences the writer was being her first book of poems appeared when she 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. "The chapters in this book are indeed sketches, finely limned and gracefully illuminated. While Miss Sarton talks to us we feel as though we were wandering through a cultivated landscape in the early afternoon of a summer's day, with twilight far in the future." - Saturday Review