A college dropout turned housewife, fashion model, and jazz singer, Anne Gray Harvey Sexton is an unusual source of self-revelatory verse that prefaced an era of modernist confessional. An ambivalent feminist, she spoke for the turmoil in women who despised the housewife's boring fate, yet she suffered guilt over ventures into angry complaint and personal freedom. A relentlessly honest observer capable of springing from disillusion to flashes of perception, she celebrated physical details of womanhood, naming menstruation, masturbation, incest, adultery, illegitimacy, and abortion, and pondered drug dependence, madness, and suicide. Long parted from religion, she retained the fault-consciousness and self-loathing of Roman Catholicism. Her freedom of expression engaged female literary figures at the same time that it distressed poet James Dickey.
Sexton was born on November 9, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts, to a prominent family. She grew up strong-willed, outstandingly attractive, and confident, a surface poise that masked misgiving. She attended Wellesley public schools and Rogers Hall, an exclusive boarding school.
