After seven decades as a published poet, literary wife and mother, international human rights activist and famed Vineyard hostess, Rose Styron has a wealth of stories to tell.

Setting them down in writing, however, had never appealed to her.

“I didn’t even keep a journal,” she said during a conversation on her lawn in Vineyard Haven, a few days after the publication of her new memoir Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart.

Sitting outside the harborfront house that she and her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Styron, bought as a summer home in 1963, Ms. Styron laughed as she recalled her response when a publisher first offered her a memoir contract, years ago.

“‘Don’t be ridiculous. I never look backward,”’ she said.

Ms. Styron and her husband William Styron purchased their Vineyard Haven home in 1963. — Maria Thibodeau

It took a global pandemic to change Ms. Styron’s mind, stranding her on the Vineyard — her year-round home since 2013 — without her usual lively round of luncheons and dinner parties, arts events, visits from family and Scrabble with friends.

“I’m a poet and a journalist. I never meant to write a memoir, but I was here alone for three years during Covid,” she said.

This time, Ms. Styron said yes to publisher Alfred A. Knopf, which has issued Beyond This Harbor in hardback, audiobook and ebook formats.

“It’s [about] my adventures and my friendships, which have been the most important,” she said.

Both during and after her nearly 54 years of marriage to Mr. Styron, Ms. Styron’s circles have included authors, actors, playwrights, politicians and other celebrities who people the memoir.

Among the friends she recalls with anecdotes and snapshots are Jacqueline Kennedy — both with John F. Kennedy and as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, James Baldwin and Pulitzer winners too numerous to mention.

Ms. Styron also writes both frankly and lyrically about her husband, who died on the Vineyard in 2006. Though passionately in love, the couple had an unequal relationship as both writers and parents. While Ms. Styron typed up his manuscripts, ran the household and supervised the children, Mr. Styron suffered from depression and showed little interest in either her poetry or their activities.

Inevitably, it was her career that gave way. After her first book, From Summer to Summer, was published in 1965, Ms. Styron kept writing in spare moments but has issued only three other poetry collections, in 1973, 1995 and 2015.

Writing her manuscript in longhand, on the same style of lined yellow paper Mr. Styron used for the manuscripts she typed, Ms. Styron found she could remember her life in detail all the way back to 1930s Baltimore, where she first began writing poetry in elementary school and liked to sneak out her bedroom window for early-morning walks.

“I was a little rebel,” said Ms. Styron, who would go on to resist more powerful authorities than her parents.

Her memoir opens in 1973, with a gripping account of a secret mission to Chile less than four months after the country’s government was overthrown in a military coup backed by the United States. Accompanied by her 17-year-old daughter Susanna, the eldest of the couple’s four children, Ms. Styron was posing as a tourist on a two-week winter vacation.

In fact, she was covertly gathering information about political prisoners and other victims of the coup on behalf of Amnesty International, which she had joined after visiting the Soviet Union with her husband.

Traveling behind the Iron Curtain, as well as to Asian, African and Latin American countries with limited human rights, was eye-opening for Ms. Styron, who until then had little experience with global affairs.

“I had been tangentially involved in politics [as] a good little Democrat and activist from college days on,” she told the Gazette. “It was a big surprise to go abroad.”

What she saw of totalitarian rule ignited Ms. Styron’s lifelong sense of social justice, which her Quaker schooling in Baltimore had reinforced. When Amnesty asked her to go to Chile, she agreed.

Their mission was risky — the chapter reads like a thriller — but Ms. Styron and her daughter pulled it off, hiding documents under layers of clothing for their trip home and narrowly evading an agent of the military regime who followed them aboard the plane.

Those two weeks marked the beginning of her career as an international activist, said Ms. Styron, who has since served on the boards of multiple human rights nonprofits and traveled throughout the world on their behalf.

But her poetry came to a standstill.

“I didn’t write a line of poetry for my first 20 years with Amnesty. I wrote articles [about human rights],” she said.

A chance meeting on a tennis court with poet Galway Kinnell, who suggested she attend a writing conference, set her back on course in the early 1990s, Ms. Styron said.

“I went, and I began to write poetry again, and I was lucky enough to have [Pulitzer-winning poets] Sharon Olds and Robert Haas as teachers,” she said.

In 1995, she published By Vineyard Light, her first book of poems since Thieves’ Afternoon in 1973. Fierce Day, a collection written after her husband’s death, was published in 2015.

Ms. Styron has included some of her poems in Beyond This Harbor, including the elegiac Veterans Day, written after her husband’s funeral, and Goodnight, Great Summer Sky, evoking a peaceful family evening on Vineyard Haven Harbor.

“Now that I’ve done a memoir, which I never meant to do, I don’t know if I’ll ever write another poem,” she said.

Then she smiled and added: “You never know.”