In the Sarton Revisited by Elizabeth Evans, the author tried to revisit the themes in Sarton’s works including her memoirs, journeys and poetry and revealed the development of the themes. The author attempted to place Sarton in the rich and full statement of her life to indicate how serious her early days in the theater were, and to suggest the complicated life she lived now. And in Sarton’s later works, especially her journeys, she showed her real old life with her audiences. She became a model of a woman living alone. And without denying the dark side of her solitude life, she thought that living alone was not a deprived life. She insisted that women spoke for their own identity and their own life. Evans also summarized some aspects that were commonly stated in all of Sarton’s journals: Sarton recorded the date and the weather at the beginning of every journal; She wrote the visits of neighbors and friends, gardening chores, shopping, and full academic life (poetry reading, lectures, and interviews), her concerns to political and social issues; She noticed life about animals, such as dogs, birds and so on; but she also recorded the details of her own health and the death of her friends, especially when illness and accidents frightened her and interrupted her work schedule.  

Mark K. Fulk’s Understanding May Sarton presented Sarton’s life, experience and literary works comprehensively. Mark stated in the first chapter that one of the main themes of Sarton’ works was solitude, “ suggesting the religious significance of a cloistered life, yet pesting it of orthodox religious meaning, and presenting it as the ideal position for a write to reflect on her life and world.” (K. Fulk, 1968) In As We Shall Be: May Sarton and Aging, Marlene Springer praised Sarton’s dignified and sensitive treatment of the elderly in her work. He thought that in eighteenth and nineteenth century literary treatment of aging and especially aging women was always negative. But “a modern exception to this pattern is May Sarton, one of the very few writers, especially in our culture, to explore profoundly both the perils and the possibilities confronted by older people; one of the few writers to treat the aged, and particularly older women, with dignity without ignoring the threats of senility, the helplessness of physical decay, the frustrations of waning power.” In her journeys, Sarton faced the adding age bravely and to some extent she cherished the process of aging very much, even regarding it as a great wealth of accumulating knowledge and experience. And in the wake of 21st, Sumon Pincharoen chose the At Seventy: A Journal, another work written by May Sarton, as the subject to finish her PHD dissertation, The Experience Through Reflection of Growing Old: A Literary Analysis, which discussed about the published personal narratives of self-reflection of growing old. At that time only a few pioneers, like Kathleen Woodward (1980a) and Janice Sokoloff (1987), emphasized aging in their literary articles, which had been written primarily for a gerontological audience (Woodward 1978; Sokoloff 1986).