Millay's European Trip and Abortion in Paris and Dorset (1921)
Poet involved
What happened
While serving as a correspondent for Vanity Fair in Europe, Millay traveled to Paris, France, where she engaged in romantic affairs and became pregnant. She then went to Dorset, England, where her mother assisted in inducing an abortion using herbal methods. This period of physical weakness and recovery followed her return to the United States.
Literary impact
The experiences of freedom, passion, and subsequent physical frailty in Europe deeply informed Millay's exploration of female autonomy, sexuality, and the costs of independence. Themes of love's transience, bodily vulnerability, and emotional resilience appear more prominently in her sonnets and later works. Her time abroad also honed her prose writing under the Nancy Boyd pseudonym, broadening her career while reinforcing her modernist yet formally traditional poetic voice. This event shaped her personal mythology of the liberated 'new woman' central to her Jazz Age appeal.
Source: Wikipedia
