Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin: Three Peas in a Pod

From Diane Wood Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton:

At the end of April she [Anne Sexton] told him [her male therapist] a story (about being molested  by an older man, a family friend, while swimming at Squirrel Island) that she knew she had made up on the spot. -- p. 62.

Variations on a theme, the three of them.

*****

Random notes from Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton:

The villanelle, p. 80 - 81.

I first encountered the villanelle when I was in my "Sylvia Plath phase." I had another blog then and wrote extensively about Sylvia Plath. Unfortunately I deleted that entire blog and lost all I had on Sylvia. Maybe I will start again someday; here's a nice link regarding Sylvia Plath and villanelles. I'm sure there are many more.

Her experience at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1958, p. 80 and following.

Sexton had a fling with one fellow poet ... this romance continued for several months by mail after they left Antioch, and Sexton's comments make it clear that she considered it a transference relationship in which her partner stood in for the unavailable De Snodgrass (as she called him), whose moustache was like Dr Orne's.

It is interesting that I never understood the concept of "transference" all that well until I read this biography. I am not sure that "transference" is always the correct interpretation of a specific phenomenon, but that can be left for another day, another discussion.