RAPTURE AND MELANCHOLY

A candid self-portrait of the “bad girl of American letters.”

Biographer Epstein offers a judicious edition of the diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), beginning in 1907, when the ebullient teenager felt sometimes overwhelmed with caring for her two younger sisters whenever her mother, a nurse, was called away. “It is very hard to be sixteen,” she confides to her diary, glad to have an outlet for what she calls her “spite.” At 19, fantasizing about a “beloved,” she pours her passion into “Renascence,” which she entered into a poetry contest in May 1912. Accepted for a volume of the winners, “Renascence” was singled out for praise by several reviewers and served to launch Millay’s career. The Poetry Society of America hosted a literary evening in her honor in 1913, when she was a student at Barnard, preparing to enter college. For the 20-year-old poet, New York City was a heady experience, and her diary reflects the excitement of meeting other poets (Sara Teasdale, for one), shopping, walking through Manhattan, and seeing her first opera, Madame Butterfly, at the Metropolitan Opera House. After graduating from Vassar, she traveled to Europe, including Albania, which had just opened to Western tourism. Her vivid entries from that trip, Epstein notes, appear here for the first time. In 1923, Millay married the wealthy Dutch businessman Eugen Boissevain, widower of suffragist Inez Milholland, and soon the couple bought Steepletop, a house in Austerlitz, New York, where Millay lived for the rest of her life. Entries reveal her as impetuous, hardworking, and passionate; friends could irritate as much as please. A lover’s rejection sent her into a depression from which she never recovered. By 1949, when she made her last entry, she had become “a solitary, tragic figure,” suffering from ill health, addiction to alcohol and opiates, and loneliness.

Authoritative introductions contribute to the literary significance of the diaries.