Bigamy Hermits

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This week, The Browser looks back at some of our favourite selections from the year gone by.

Anaïs Nin’s Bicoastal Bigamy

Joy Lanzendorfer | Alta | 26th June 2023

Nin spent two and a half decades on what she called her "trapeze", swinging back and forth every six weeks between two husbands on opposite coasts. In New York, she had wealthy banker Hugh Parker Guiler, who financed her writing life, and had no idea that her regular trips to California were so that she could spend her time there as the wife of a forest ranger 16 years her junior (3,687 words)

Ornamental Hermits

Shoshi Parks | Smithsonian | 7th July 2023

Notes on the fashion among 18th century English aristocrats for keeping hermits on their country estates. Terms for a hermit might include a cave or hut, food and water, and a lump sum at the end of a seven-year term. The hermit's main job was to be silently picturesque, and thus to delight visitors. “By 1750, if you only put in one structure in your garden, it would have been a hermitage” (1,900 words)

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