Brenda Venus - Relationship With Henry Miller

Relationship With Henry Miller

Venus met American novelist Henry Miller when she was in her twenties and became his muse.

In his book Joey, Miller wrote of Venus: "To love at the end of one's life is something special. Few women can inspire that sort of love. To wake up with the words of love on one's lips--what bliss! Just to say "Brenda" puts me in ecstasy."

Miller's long-time friend and confidant, fellow novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell wrote in the introduction to Miller's book Dear, Dear Brenda that: "The role of Brenda Venus will keep its interest and importance also as a memorial of his last great attachment--an Ariel to his Prospero... She enabled him to dominate his infirmities and to experience all the Joys of Paradise."

According to writer Ed Millis, Venus was a source of inspiration to the aging and ailing Miller: "Brenda was 20, Henry was 84. She was a beautiful Southern belle, "The Boticelli of Mississippi" -- he called her. Henry, the renegade intellectual, the writer, had taken millions of us to the sexy Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. Now he was sick and slowly recuperating. He needed a lift in spirits... Brenda the Muse breathed life into her mortal charge and gave him reason to live. He wrote her over 4,000 letters and gave her focus and fine tuning!"

Read more about this topic:  Brenda Venus

Famous quotes containing the words relationship with, relationship and/or miller:

    We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.
    Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)

    From infancy, a growing girl creates a tapestry of ever-deepening and ever- enlarging relationships, with her self at the center. . . . The feminine personality comes to define itself within relationship and connection, where growth includes greater and greater complexities of interaction.
    Jeanne Elium (20th century)

    The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
    —Henry Miller (1891–1980)