Kate Millett, the wayward artist, thinker and activist whose 1970 book Sexual Politics became a keystone of second-wave feminism, has died at the age of 82.

Perhaps aptly for someone who wrote widely and fervently of her pursuit of love, she succumbed to a heart attack during an annual holiday in Paris to celebrate her birthday with her wife and longtime collaborator, the photojournalist Sophie Keir. “Let’s always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year – let it always be an affair,” Millett wrote in Sita, her 1976 account of an earlier lesbian relationship, which, like subsequent autobiographical works, became an exploration of forms of love. Lena Dunham was among those who paid immediate tribute to her cultural importance, and its continuing impact on a new generation of readers.

Born in Minnesota in 1934 to an alcoholic father and a mother who worked as a teacher and insurance saleswoman to support her three daughters, Millett went first to the University of Minnesota. A rich aunt paid for her to go on to Oxford, where she became the first American woman to receive a first-class degree from St Hilda’s College.(theguardian)…[+]