As the oldest child of divorced parents who were never home, Millay was forced to act as a surrogate mother for her two younger sisters. It was an heavy burden placed on a young child. One particular passage, written when Millay was nineteen, resonates particularly:
"I'm getting old and ugly. My hands are stiff and rough and stained and blistered. I can feel my face dragging down. I can feel the lines coming underneath my skin. They don't show yet but I can feel a hundred of them underneath. I love beauty more than anything else in the world and I can't take time to be pretty....Crawl int…
