Born: February 22, 1892, Rockland, Maine, United States
Died: October 19, 1950, Austerlitz, New York, United States
Education: Vassar College
Lived: Ragged Island, Harpswell, Maine
75½ Bedford St, New York, NY 10014, USA (40.73138, -74.00499)
Steepletop, 440 E Hill Rd, Austerlitz, NY 12017, USA (42.32114, -73.44319)
Whitehall (52 High St, Camden, ME 04843)
200 Broadway, Rockland, ME 04841
Buried: Steepletop Cemetery, Austerlitz, Columbia County, New York, USA
Find A Grave Memorial# 713
Siblings: Norma Millay Ellis, Kathleen Millay
Movies: Hitler's Madman
Edna St. Vincent Millay was a lyrical poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was known for her feminist activism and her many love affairs. Counted among her close friends were Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Susan Glaspell, as well as Floyd Dell and Edmund Wilson, both of whom proposed marriage to her and were refused. While playing the lead in her own The Princess Marries the Page at Vassar, she was approached by the British actress Edith Wynne Matthison, who, excited by the performance, came backstage to kiss Millay and invite her to her summer home. Millay felt great passion in the kiss and the two exchanged letters, providing one of her few known straightforward pronouncements of lesbian love: "You wrote me a beautiful letter,--I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was.--I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love. . . . When you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to You.” Another of Edna’s lovers was Thelma Wood, who later became Djuna Barnes’ lover.
Edith Wynne Matthison (November 23, 1875 – September 23, 1955)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950)
Days of Love edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
ISBN-10: 1500563323
Release Date: September 21, 2014
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Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was born at 200 Broadway, Rockland, ME 04841, to Cora Lounella Buzelle, a nurse, and Henry Tolman Millay, a schoolteacher who would later become a superintendent of schools. Her middle name derives from St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, where her uncle's life had been saved just before her birth. The family's house was "between the mountains and the sea where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of the neighboring pine woods."
Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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In 1901, a young widow, who had spent her honeymoon in Camden, purchased an 1834 Sea Captains house. The first of only six owners, she took in a handful of summer guests for income, and then added rooms each year until she operated Whitehall (52 High St, Camden, ME 04843), one of only five hotels in Camden Maine at the start of the century. Whitehall, sometimes called Whitehall Hotel, later became the Whitehall Inn. In 2015, new owners have returned the property to its original and classic name -- Whitehall. It was the summer home for the elite of Camden's summer visitors. Guests would arrive by train with maids or by chauffeur driven cars. Royalty, titans of industry and celebrities, both famous and infamous, made Whitehall a part of their summer schedule. The inn has welcomed a king, a U.S. President and other political notables, many fabled screen stars and sports heroes. And the guest list includes a supermodel, a legendary TV anchorman, and a world-renowned singer-songwriter. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) used to work at this tourists’ inn during the busy summer season. In 1912, “Vincent,” as she preferred to be called, did her first public reading here for guests and employees at the inn’s end-of-summer party. The first lines of the poem she read, “Renascence,” described the view of the Maine countryside from nearby Mount Battie, which Vincent loved to climb. “All I could see from where I stood,” the poem began, “was three long mountains and a wood.” A professor, who was vacationing at Whitehall, was so impressed by Vincent’s poem that he arranged to have one of his wealthy friends pay for the girl to study at Vassar College.
Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228297
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75½ Bedford St is a building in the Greenwich Village area of New York City that is only 9 feet 6 inches (2.9 meters) wide. It is considered to be the narrowest house in New York. Its past tenants have included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ann McGovern, cartoonist William Steig and anthropologist Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 - November 15, 1978). It is sometimes referred to as the Millay House, indicated by a New York City Landmark plaque on the outside of the house.
Address: 75½ Bedford St, New York, NY 10014, USA (40.73138, -74.00499)
Type: Private Property
Place
Built in 1873
The three-story house is located at 75½ Bedford St., off Seventh Ave. between Commerce and Moore Streets, in the West Greenwich Village section of Manhattan. On the inside, the house measures 8 ft. 7 in. wide; at its narrowest, it is only 2 ft. wide. There is a shared garden in the rear of the house. The archives of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation states that the house was constructed in 1873 during a smallpox epidemic, for Horatio Gomez, trustee of the Hettie Hendricks-Gomez Estate, on what was the former carriage entranceway for the adjacent property, which includes the 1799 house at 77 Bedford St., built by Joshua Isaacs, the oldest house in Greenwich Village. However, the house may have been constructed earlier, as the style that appears in a 1922 photograph at the New-York Historical Society is typical of the 1850’s Italianate architecture common in the area at the time. In 1923, the house was leased by a consortium of artists who used it for actors working at the Cherry Lane Theater. Cary Grant and John Barrymore stayed at the house while performing at the Cherry Lane during this time. Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and her new husband, coffee importer Eugen Jan Boissevain, lived in the house from 1923 to 1924. They hired Ferdinand Savignano to renovate the house, who added a skylight, transformed the top floor into a studio for Millay and added a Dutch-inspired front gabled façade for her husband. Later occupants included cartoonist William Steig, and his sister-in-law, anthropologist Margaret Mead. The current owner is George Gund IV (son of sports entrepreneur George Gund III), who purchased the house for $3.25 million in June 2013. “A centrally placed spiral staircase dominates all three floors and bisects the space into two distinct living areas. The narrow steps call for expert sideways navigational skills. Under the stairwell on the first floor is a tiny utility closet, the only closed storage space in the house. All three floors have fireplaces.” The house has two bathrooms, and its galley kitchen comes with a microwave built into the base of the winding staircase that rises to the upper floors.
Life
Who: Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950)
Edna St. Vincent Millay was a poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work. The poet Richard Wilbur asserted, "She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century." Millay was openly bisexual. Counted among her close friends were the writers Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Susan Glaspell, as well as Floyd Dell and the critic Edmund Wilson, both of whom proposed marriage to her and were refused. In January 1921, she went to Paris, where she met and befriended the sculptor Thelma Wood. In 1923 she married 43-year-old Eugen Jan Boissevain (1880–1949), the widower of the labor lawyer and war correspondent Inez Milholland, a political icon Millay had met during her time at Vassar. Boissevain died in 1949 of lung cancer, and Millay lived alone for the last year of her life.
by Elisa Rolle
Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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Steepletop, also known as the Edna St. Vincent Millay House, was the farmhouse home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband Eugene Jan Boissevain, in Austerlitz, New York. Her former home and gardens are maintained by the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society. The Millay Colony for the Arts, founded in 1973 by Norma Millay Ellis, sister of the poet, is also located at Steepletop.
Address: 440 E Hill Rd, Austerlitz, NY 12017, USA (42.32114, -73.44319)
Type: Museum (open to public)
Hours: Monday through Friday 9.00-17.00
Phone: +1 518-392-3362
National Register of Historic Places: 71000534, 1971. Also National Historic Landmarks.
Place
The name Steepletop comes from a pink, conical wildflower that grows there. The Society opened the house for tours in 2010. The guest house is believed to have been built in the late XVIII century, considerably predating the main house, which is believed to have been built around 1870. Millay and Boissevain bought the property, which had been a 635-acre (257 ha) blueberry farm and moved in in 1925, after the period in which critics and scholars generally believe she had done her best work. She continued to write since the rural setting provided sufficient distance from the outside world, and the couple lived there except for periods of travel. After WWII, in the late 1940s, she left Steepletop less frequently. Boissevain died in 1949, making her even more reclusive in the year before she was found dead at the foot of the stairway in the main house. The fall was the proximate cause of death, but what led to it is unknown. Her sister Norma and her husband, painter Charles Ellis, moved in afterwards. In 1973, they established Millay Colony for the Arts on the seven acres (2.8 ha) around the guest house and barn. After her husband’s death in 1976, Norma continued to manage the colony program until her death in 1986. During that time, in 1980, she renovated the barn into housing for visiting artists. In 1997 a disabled-accessible main building was built on colony property. The colony continues to offer one-month residencies to writers, visual artists and composers from the U.S. and other countries. The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society remains in charge of the main house, the outbuildings around it and the grounds as a whole. It operates the property as a historic house museum dedicated to Millay and has spent much effort on restoring the house and grounds.
Life
Who: Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950)
On the grounds of Steepletop, Boissevain and Millay built a barn (from a Sears Roebuck kit), and then a writing cabin and a tennis court. Millay grew her own vegetables in a small garden. The couple later bought Ragged Island in Casco Bay, Maine, as a summer retreat. Edna St. Vincent Millay died at her home on October 19, 1950 and is buried at Steepletop: the path rises through hardwood forest to the poet's grave, in a small clearing with a bench that invites contemplation. It's a short walk, maybe a half-mile from the country road high on the Taconic Ridge. In 2003 the Friends of the Millay Society built the Millay Poetry Trail along the dirt road leading to her grave and those of several family members. The trail is open to the public and posted with her nature poetry along the shaded route.
by Elisa Rolle
Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228297
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Ragged Island (Harpswell, Maine) is a privately owned island in Harpswell, Cumberland County, Maine, which is geographically within Casco Bay in the Gulf of Maine. It is notable as having been the summer home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) and husband Eugen Jan Boissevain from 1933 until her death in 1950. Whatever the history of the island's name, at least one 1790 maritime chart identifies it simply as Cold Arse.
Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228297
Amazon (print): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1532901909/?tag=elimyrevandra-20
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