May Sarton

Kinds of Love

Friendship, marriage, and intertwined lives in a small New Hampshire town.

Christina Chapman and her husband Cornelius, both past seventy, are "summer people"—people who come to rural New England for the summer months and go home to the city when the cold weather comes. This year, however, Christina and Cornelius have decided to stay on.

May Sarton's Willard is a small town in the rocky hills of New Hampshire, a place that attracts "the untameable, the wild, the gentle." As Sarton takes us into the lives of the people who live there, we encounter a rich tapestry of characters and relationships. In the center are the deep, prickly friendship between Christina, an old Bostonian, and Ellen, the daughter of a farmer, and the unfolding process by which Christina and her husband "come into their own" in their marriage and become winter people at last.

"We watch with fascination as Miss Sarton builds her huge portrait. . . . With complete success, [Sarton] portrays Williard under a double spell—first the spell cast by the spectacular winter weather, and second, the spell of Christina's longing, a longing that never tires and that continues to hold her story in tension long after the ice and snow are gone and forgotten." —The New Yorker