Anaïs and Edna

Remembering the back-to-back birthdays of Anaïs Nin and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thoughts about the evolution of modern feminine sexuality and values.

Photo by Andres F. Uran on Unsplash

My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
    It gives a lovely light!

Figs from Thistles: First Fig (1920) by Edna St. Vincent Millay

It is interesting to think that when Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell—known to us as Anaïs Nin—was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, little Edna St. Vincent Millay was on the cusp of celebrating her 11th birthday with her family in Maine. Edna’s father and mother were by that time separated and soon to be divorced. The Millay girls lived very non-conformist, independent lives. Even as a young grammar student, Edna wanted to be called Vincent, much to the chagrin of the grade school principal. He called her by any woman's name that started with a V.¹

In 1914, when little Anaïs was 11 and preparing to make the trip across the Atlantic from Barcelona to New York with her mother and brothers (her parents also separated), Edna St. Vincent Millay was already a celebrated poet and writer who was studying at Vassar College.

In 1923 both women got married. Nin was 20 when she married Hugh Parker Guiler in Havana, Cuba, and Millay was 31 when she married 43-year-old Eugen Jan Boissevain.

Edna St. Vincent Millay once said,

Marriage is one of the most civilized institutions in the world … But swimming is one of the most wonderful of sports, and yet there are always some people who cannot swim who insist on going into the water and getting drowned. Many people spoil marriage in a like manner. One should be sure she knows how to be married before rushing into it.

Both women’s marriages defied the conventions of the time. Neither were particularly faithful to their spouses. Nin actually maintained two husbands: Guiler on the East Coast and Rupert Pole, a former actor 16 years her junior whom she married in 1955, on the the West Coast.

Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anais Nin had back to back birthdays (February 22, 1892 and February 21, 1903 respectively) and were similar in terms of libertine lifestyles and bisexual relationships. Their attitudes toward life seemed so alike that even their quotes could be mistaken for each other.

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all. - Nin

I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes. - Millay

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself. - Non

Life is a quest and love a quarrel. - Millay

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. - Nin

Not truth, but faith, it is that keeps the world alive. - Millay

We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection. - Nin

It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over. - Millay

Millay may have been the better writer but the more tragic character, having died at the premature age of 58. After a terrible car accident she eventually found herself addicted to pain killers. Her body was discovered at the bottom of the stairs of her home with a broken her neck.

Anaïs Nin could likely be considered more controversial, not only for being a bigamist and writing all that erotica she is known for, but because she had an incestuous relationship with her father as an adult. That seems very tame compared to the Millay’s cross-dressing.

Neither woman had children. In early adulthood, Millay had two abortions. And Nin described her infertility in her memoir, A Woman Speaks (1975):

I had surgery when I was nine years old which made it [having children] impossible. And we didn't find out until the first child I conceived was still-born — was strangled by adhesions. At that time they made a very poor kind of surgery and created adhesions which strangled the child. So nature denied me that. It wasn't by choice. But I don't feel that unless you've had a child you're not fulfilled. I don't feel that I've missed anything. Because I transferred that to other relationships. As [D.H.] Lawrence said, we don't need more children, we need more hope in the world.

Of course, I need to mention all the affairs. Millay had quite a few that you can read about here. However, Nin’s affairs are far more documented—and detailed. For Valentine’s Day week,

Letters of Note

posted a particularly steamy exchange between Nin and the writer Henry Miller, her most notorious lover. (Read at your own risk; it is graphic and I can’t say it is good for one’s soul, if that is something that concerns you.)

But Nin also wrote poetry…

I would be remiss if I neglected to post a bit about Millay’s poetry as well, but my good friends at

The Daily Poem Podcast

and

Poems Ancient and Modern

did a better job than I could in introducing people to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work:

Three by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Today’s Poem: Grown-Up

As a good Catholic wife and mother, you may be wondering why I am writing about these morally problematic women. Wouldn’t my time be better spend concentrating on another Pisces² like Anne Bradstreet who has a birthday coming up?

I’ve been thinking about how the sensationalization of women’s romantic affairs creates a distinctive relationship with the public. Our modern analog would be Taylor Swift whose love life and song writing are so intertwined that her personal business is also her professional business. I bet you that Millay and Nin would have liked this song:

Music, art, poetry, literature… You can trace our moral evolution as a society from community-focused values to the current more individualistic ones we have today.

Both Millay and Nin are part of our literary landscape—there is no denying that. They shaped modern Western culture with their brazen, non-conformist takes on love, lust and sexuality. Therefore, they have influenced the moral ecology we live in today. I know I have quoted this before, but it is worth mentioning this David Brooks definition again,

A moral ecology is a set of norms, assumptions, beliefs, and habits of behavior and an institutionalized set of moral demands that emerge organically. Our moral ecology encourages us to be a certain sort of person.

I have written about the crisis in modern masculinity, but I have not really delved into the complimentary issues in modern femininity. We cannot talk about defining what it means to be a man without also talking about what it means to be a woman—in particular, a woman in a creative field.³ Millay and Nin were early hires in the Tortured Poets Department, and both made it to the corporate office—executive level no less! As artists, it seems impossible to study their work without knowing about their lives. Is this fair? Did these two writers somehow make it impossible to tease the personal from the artistic? What does that say about what we expect of creative women? How much do we expect them to share? It seems like we do not expect this same nakedness from men.

1. Epstein, Daniel Mark (2001). What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6727-2.

2. Relax. I know good Catholics don’t follow astrology either!

3. We will have to set aside the other current issues with gender for the moment for the sake of clarity.