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Encore is May Sarton’s last journal. In this affirmative work she once again celebrates her life, in spite of the many limitations imposed by what she now refers to as old age. Although she admits she is a “stranger in the land of old age,” as she struggles with daily setbacks, there is still her intense love for life and all its challenges. As she did in her previous journal, Sarton describes both hardships and joys in the daily round of her life in old age—physical struggles counterbalanced by the satisfactions of friendship, nature, critical recognition, and creative spark. Publishers weekly reviewed Encore that “Sarton’s engrossing daily journal discloses varied octogenarian satisfactions--garden and flowers that bloom in every entry, celebratory lunches with friends and admirers who frequent her Maine home, the heady bouquet of critical recognition, the rebirth of her poetic voice and newly written poems.” Though Sarton’s tone is positive, it is never naive: old age also means bouts of pain and ill health, wearying domestic disasters, a war against fatigue, and a keen awareness of the perilousness of life on all sides, knowing that at any moment something frightful may happen. Despite these parameters, the dominant note sounded is fearless and triumphant, and Sarton's superb accomplishment in these journals may be in convincing us that old age is an experience not to fear, but to look forward to that we believe her when she affirms.
1.2 Reviewing the Research on May Sarton
In China, the systematic researches on May Sarton are lacking. Studies about May Sarton are still at a starting point. The most useful materials are Sarton’s several journals translated by Guo Huayang: Journal of a Solitude (1973), The House by the sea (1976), Recovering (1980), and After the Stroke (1988). Moreover, there are a few papers studying May Sarton’s At seventy. Wang Yina said “poetry plays an essential role in Sarton’s old life and she writes poems on nature, friendship and so on” (2015:16). It is poetry that helps May Sarton present old life, communicate with the outside world while living a solitude life, understand nature better and gain more happiness. In Zhou Li’s paper “Happiness in Old Life in May Sarton’s Journal At Seventy”, she made a profound exposition about happiness in May Sarton’s aging life including travel, life writing and interacting with friends. And Chen Rongfang revealed the relation between aging and dying as well as analyzed the active struggle and efforts that May Sarton takes in face of aging with her own morality in paper “Fear of dying in May Sarton’s At Seventy”. In the last chapter of Chen’s paper, she reviews Sarton “she was not an old lady who was defeated by this meaningless and uncontrolled subject. On the contrary, she recorded many various activities she did to release the dismal emotion in At Seventy. She balanced the fear and anxieties of dying with the celebrations of growing old and its rewards: a huge and appreciate audience, excellent book sales, taking trips and managing gardening. She considered aging and dying as a kind of progress” (2015:16).
While in the western countries, May Sarton is well known that scholars pay more attentions to her. The researches on May Sarton are at a more mature level. There are a great number of reviews and notes related to May Sarton and her works. In 1972, the book May Sarton written by Agnes Sibley was the first work to study Sarton’s novels, poetry and other works as a whole and gave an overall assessment of the achievements of Sarton. Susan and Marilyn have done critical essays on May Sarton. They wrote the most significant work - That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton in 1992. In this work, Susan and Marilyn thought Sarton casts herself as a character in her own story, recreating significance life experience, pondering its shape and discovering its outcome. From her journals, it can be easy to find Sarton describes her life in a real way and records her changes and development of thoughts. So she is regarded as the explorer of the human spirit.