SOURCE: Eder, Doris L. “Woman Writer: May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.” International Journal of Women's Studies 1, no. 2 (March-April 1978): 150-58.

In the following essay, Eder explores autobiographical aspects of Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, and calls the novel “a novel of dualities resolved into unity.”

I

May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is a masterly and haunting book. It concerns the difficulties of being a woman writer and was, the writer tells us, a difficult book to write.¹ F. Hilary Stevens is obviously close to May Sarton, a portrait of the female writer at seventy, but although the relationship of this fiction to the creator's life is intimate, elements of the life have in the novel undergone a sea change into something rich and strange.

May Sarton was born in Wondelgem, Belgium, the daughter of George Sarton, the historian of science, and...