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• Born: 21 February 1903
• Birthplace: Neuilly, France
• Died: 1977
• Best Known As: Diarist and lover of Henry Miller

A naturalized American citizen (she was born in France), Anaïs Nin was a modernist writer of short stories and novels. Her sexually explicit journals and her correspondence with her lover, the American writer Henry Miller, led to her popular resurgence in the 1970s as a feminist icon and a literary figure of the avant-garde.

Source

Nin (c. 1903-1977) is best known for her erotica and for her seven volumes of diaries published from 1966 to the end of her life.

Nin's other works, which include novels and short stories, are greatly influenced by Surrealism, a movement initiated in the 1920s by artists dedicated to exploring irrationality and the unconscious, and by the formal experiments of such Modernists as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who employed expressionistic and stream-of-consciousness narration. Rather than relying on a chronological ordering of events as in conventional narratives, Nin wrote in a poetic style featuring repetition, omission, and pastiche as organizing principles. Critics favorably note her attention to physical details and the influence of sensory information on the moods, thoughts, and interactions of her characters. Nin's predominant subject is psychological, and her insights into the behavioral and thought patterns of women have been particularly praised as both astute and free of misanthropy.

Nin began her diary as an ongoing letter to her father, Spanish musician and composer Joaquin Nin, who abandoned his family when she was eleven years old. Nin kept a journal throughout her life, recording such experiences as friendships with famous artists and writers, her years in psychotherapy, and, eventually, her worldwide travels on speaking engagements. Because she edited and excerpted her original diaries for publication in seven volumes as The Diary of Anais Nin, many commentators assess them for insights they shed upon Nin's literary technique. Nin's diaries relate incidents in the present tense and feature real people who appear as carefully delineated characters in fully-realized settings. The diaries are divided according to theme and share many of the concerns expressed in Nin's fiction, including the life of the creative individual, psychoanalysis, the relation between the inner and the outer world, and the nature of sexuality. The volumes include photographs, conversations presented in dialogue form, and letters from Nin's personal correspondence, completing the impression of a thoughtfully orchestrated work of art rather than a spontaneous outpouring of emotions. Susan Stanford Friedman determined: "The Diary records Nin's attempt to create a whole identity in a culture that defines WOMAN in terms of her fragmented roles as mother, daughter, wife, and sister."

Nin's first published work, The House of Incest, is often considered a prose poem due to its intensely resonant narrative. This book achieves a dream-like quality through its emphasis on psychological states rather than on surface reality. Nin's next publication, The Winter of Artifice, contains three long short stories. The first, "Djuna," concerns a menage a trois that closely resembles the relationship Nin depicted in her diary as existing between herself, novelist Henry Miller, and Miller's second wife, June. In "Lilith," Nin portrays the disappointing reunion of a woman with her father, who abandoned her in her childhood, while "The Voice" features an unnamed psychoanalyst and his four female patients who must learn to incorporate the emotions experienced in their dreams into their conscious lives. Under a Glass Bell, another collection of Nin's short fiction, contains "Birth," one of her most celebrated pieces. In this story, a woman undergoes excruciating labor only to bear a stillborn child and discover that through this process she has been symbolically freed of her past. This Hunger…, Nin's next collection of short fiction, extends her exploration of the female unconscious in psychoanalytic terms.

Cities of the Interior, which Nin described as a "continuous novel," is often considered her most ambitious and critically successful project. Between 1946 and 1961, Nin published the work in five parts; these installments were published as Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. Ladders to Fire concerns Lillian, a character known for her violent temper, who is as dissatisfied with her extramarital affair as she is with her marriage. Lillian seeks the perfect lover as an antidote to the problems of her life. In Children of the Albatross, Djuna, a minor character in Ladders to Fire, is emotionally stunted due to her father's abandonment. Djuna prefers playing mother to a series of adolescent lovers rather than becoming involved in a mature relationship with a man. In The Four-Chambered Heart, Djuna gains a measure of self-awareness through her relationship with Rango, a Guatemalan musician and political activist. A Spy in the House of Love, Nin's most popular novel, features Sabina, a minor character in the earlier volumes. A woman looking for affection through sexual gratification, Sabina discovers she has never experienced love. Seduction of the Minotaur reintroduces Lillian, who realizes the preciousness of human life while travelling in Mexico and returns to her husband a more mature woman. Collages (1964), an experimental novel that relies upon pastiche unified by a single character, reworks themes from Nin's earlier novels.

Much of Nin's fame is attributable to the short erotic pieces she wrote for a patron while living in Paris during the early 1940s. Collected in Delta of Venus and Little Birds, these works have garnered much commentary regarding their status as literature. Although many feminist critics object in principle to sexually explicit literature, some have championed Nin's erotica, declaring that these stories advocate mutual respect and consent between the participants in a sexual relationship. Some critics defend Nin's graphic depiction of sexual situations as an exploration of psychological truths, while others emphasize that her artistry removes these pieces from the category of pornography.

Further Reading

Newsweek, January 24, 1977.

New York Times, January 16, 1977.

Time, January 24, 1977.

Washington Post, January 16, 1977.

Anais Nin Observed: From a Film Portrait of a Woman as Artist, Swallow Press, 1976.

Authors in the News, Gale, Volume II, 1976.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume I, 1973, Volume IV, 1975, Volume VIII, 1978, Volume XI, 1979, Volume XIV, 1980.

Cutting, Rose Marie, Anais Nin: A Reference Guide, C. K. Hall, 1978.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume II: American Novelists since World War II, 1978, Volume IV: American Writers in Paris, 1980.

Evans, Oliver, Anais Nin, Southern Illinois University Press, 1968.

Franklin, Benjamin V, Anais Nin: A Bibliography, Kent State University Press, 1973.

For more information on Anaïs Nin, visit Britannica.com.

(ənī'ĭs nĭn, nēn) , 1903–77, American writer, b. Paris. The daughter of the Spanish composer Joaquín Nin, she came to the United States as a child. She was a psychoanalytic patient of Otto Rank, and a deep concern with the subconscious is evidenced in her work. This is particularly true of her best-known works, her autobiographical diaries, which reveal her psychological and artistic development. These have been published in several collections: early diaries, 1914–31 (4 vol., 1980–85, J. Sherman, ed.); diaries, 1931–74 (7 vol., 1969–81, G. Stuhlmann, ed.); and unexpurgated diaries (4 vol., 1986–96). Nin's fiction, which is noted for its poetic style and searching portraits of women, includes the novels Winter of Artifice (1939) and A Spy in the House of Love (1954). Her published works include her correspondence with Henry Miller (1965); critical works, such as The Novel of the Future (1970); and two volumes of erotica, The Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979).

Bibliography

See biography by D. Bair (1995); study by B. L. Knapp (1978).

1903-1977

Anaïs Nin, a diarist, writer, and lay analyst, was born on February 21, 1903, in Neuilly, near Paris. She died on January 16, 1977 in Los Angeles.

She was the daughter of Joaquin J. Nin y Castellanos (1879-1949), Cuban-born Spanish pianist and composer, and Rosa Culmell (1871-1954), Danish-French soprano. Nin lived in France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain until 1914, when her mother took her and two younger brothers to America. Her father, a compulsive Don Juan, had deserted his family for a young student. In New York Nin soon quit school, educated herself, and worked as a model for artists and clothing manufacturers.

In 1923 she married Boston-born Hugh Parker Guiler (1898-1985), a Columbia University graduate. From 1924 until 1939 the Guilers lived in Paris, where "Hugo" became an officer of an America bank, and Nin pursued her writing. They returned to New York in 1940, due to the war, and Nin, in 1948, began a "trapeze" life between her husband in New York and a lover in California, which she secretively pursued for almost thirty years. She died of cancer in Los Angeles in January 1977.

Lastingly traumatized by the enforced separation from her beloved father, on her journey into lifelong "exile," the eleven-year-old Catholic girl began a deeply confessional diary, from which edited selections first appeared in 1966. A record of an unending effort to realize and reconcile multiple potentials of an essentially fluid self, to find absolution in art, and to express an unrestrained female sexuality—see, for instance, the erotic stories in Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979)—Nin's Diary stands as a unique, massive, psychological document of a woman's life in the 20th century.

Nin read and defended D. H. Lawrence in her first book, An Unprofessional Study (1932), and had an incestuous reunion with her father in 1933. Confused by her eruptive sexual awakening, and after discovering psychoanalysis, Nin initially became a patient of René Allendy, who failed to understand her creative needs. Her next treatment was with Otto Rank, who fell in love with her. In 1934 she followed Rank to New York. She briefly served as his assistant and conducted result-oriented therapy sessions with a number of patients in 1935 and 1936, but eventually returned to Paris and her writing. See, for instance, the story "The Voice" in Winter of Artifice (1939).

Bibliography

Nin, Anaïs. (1936). The house of incest, a prose poem. Paris: Siana Press.

——. (1959). Cities of the interior. Athens, OH: The Swallow Press.

——. (1966-80). The diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1974. (G. Stuhlman, Ed.) New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

——. (1978-85), The early diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1931. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

——. (1986-96). A journal of love: the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1939. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

—GUNTHER STUHLMANN

(1903-1977)

1936	The House of Incest. After publishing her first book, a critical work entitled D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932), Nin presents her initial creative work, an extended prose poem that is a dreamlike rendering of psychological states of an unnamed woman. The work's originality and intensity have caused many to regard the work as Nin's greatest fictional achievement. Nin was born in Paris and came to the United States as a teenager. She would be best known for her seven-volume The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966-1980).
1939	The Winter of Artifice. Nin's second volume of fiction contains three novellas; one of them, "Djuna," reflects the author's relationship with Henry Miller and his wife, June.
1944	Under a Glass Bell. Edmund Wilson's praise of this story collection--he describes Nin's work as "half short stories, half dreams," mixing "exquisite poetry with a homely realistic observation"--would lead to Nin's finding a commercial publisher for her works in the United States.
1945	This Hunger. Self-published in a limited edition, the volume contains three related stories describing women's unconsciousness and sexual repression.
1946	Ladders to Fire. Nin's novel about a "woman's struggle to understand her own nature" initiates a five-volume "continuous novel," Cities of the Interior. The continuations that follow are Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Solar Barque (1959).
1966	Diary. The first of six volumes of Nin's diary is published (completed in 1976). The sexually frank and revealing diaries help make Nin a spokesperson for the liberated woman of the period.

Quotes:

"Dreams are necessary to life."

"I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked"

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing."

"Electric flesh-arrows... traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm."

See more famous quotes by Anais Nin