She was the sort of solitary who both welcomed and fended off visitors

She was the sort of solitary who both welcomed and fended off visitors.By the end of her life, May Sarton could be proud of having gained many awards and prizes She was the recipient of 17 honorary doctorates. She both needed and resented these signs of love, these intrusions on her privacy. It was possible to read in them an almost uncomfortably intimate narrative of the anxiety about being a writer that Sarton felt. Her openness brought her fan letters from all over the world, and she spent an enormous amount of time responding to these. Her journals, which she published annually, tracked her progress into a territory relatively uncharted in literature.

Sarton lived alone, and tried in the journals to record honestly the joys, worries and difficulties of that life. This resulted in the kind of confessional prose, anathema to many critics, that endeared her to a young generation of readers preoccupied with issues of women's freedom, independence and autonomy.Plant Dreaming Deep (1968) and Journal of a Solitude (1973) were hailed as a new kind of writing. Her novels reveal her commitment to the cause of social justice. Much of her work involves a consideration of ageing and old age: As We Are Now (1973) delves into an elderly woman's incarceration in a cruel nursing home; The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989) deals with starting a bookshop business at 60.If ageing was her great theme, she dealt with it most originally in her autobiographical writing. Her messages are plain; she wants to reveal human truth, not to create dazzling fictions Plot and character are a means to that end. However, her public readings drew the kind of large, enthusiastic audience which many a more correctly avant- garde poet might envy.Sarton's best-known and best-loved novel is probably Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), her "coming-out" novel, whose story of a poet giving an interview to a couple of journalists included a discussion of lesbian life and love.The hallmark of Sarton's prose fiction style is sincerity, simplicity and compassion. Her first publication was a collection of poems, Encounter in April (1937), and she managed a further 18 volumes in her lifetime, including a Collected Poems in 1974.

She wrote lyric poetry characterised by adherence to traditional structures and lack of innovation. Rhyme and rhythm mattered greatly to her; she believed that free verse was formless. Her kind of formal and linguistic control is now coming back into repute, but for a long time her dignified, humanist verse, preoccupied with themes of morality, love and loss, was seen as hopelessly old-fashioned in an age dedicated to experiment. Sarton made a name for herself in Britain in the late Seventies and early Eighties, when her books began to be published by the Women's Press, and she was quickly taken up by a feminist readership.In the early Thirties, Sarton worked in the theatre as an actor and director but her involvement in the profession was not successful and she turned her attention to writing. In her published journals she frequently boasted of their friendship. Woolf, in her own diary account, was altogether less flattering about the eager young American.

Having met Woolf became part of Sarton's literary credentials. In the brilliant Powell and Pressburger comedy of imperial manners, The Life and Death Colonel Blimp, the hero nips to Africa every time he is fed up, and his walls start comically sprouting lions and warthogs, antelope and porcupine He wasn't alone. None of these observations remotely mitigates the original crime. Even if reparations did nothing but free the noisier Afrophiles from their infatuation with the shocking misdeeds of the imperial past, they would be a good idea. The sad thing is that most viewers, in these animal-righteous times, will have had their consciences stirred more readily by the sight of a dead leopard than by the thought of all those people chained, whipped and stashed on disease-ridden boats for the middle passage. Africa's Big Game might have sounded like a preview of the Cameroon v Nigeria World Cup qualifier, but it turned out to be a sombre account of the European love-affair with Africa's wild animals.Our obsession with African wildlife took the unusual form of killing as much of it as possible.

Anyone who had the cheek to point out that the history of slavery was not quite a black and white issue, that the Arab slave-trade existed before the European one and flourished long after abolition in Britain, and that African leaders played a role in the dreadful commerce, was branded a moral idiot and a racist. What a pity. The Radical Option - Reparations for Africa raised the temperature by examining the notion that the West should make good on its moral debt to Africa, just as Germany has compensated Israel for the crimes of the Holocaust. It's a good idea: the debt seems evident enough; no one can live cheerfully with the idea that when slavery was abolished it was the slave-owners who were compensated But the programme seemed over-anxious to keep things simple. It does the place no service to pretend that it is some kind of surreal invention, as if all that pillage and plunder and suffering were not real But otherwise the week went well. THOSE clever people in BBC2's publicity department did marvellously well to organise such a sweltering week for the launch of their summer series about Africa Talk about method viewing.