“I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux.” -Anaïs Nin (1903-1977)
“Anaïs Nin was a French-born novelist, passionate eroticist and short story writer, who gained international fame with her journals. Spanning the years from 1931 to 1974, they give an account of one woman’s voyage of self-discovery. “It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.” (from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. I, 1966)
Anaïs Nin was largely ignored until the 1960s. Today she is regarded as one of the leading women writers of the 20th-century and a source of inspiration for women challenging conventionally defined gender roles.
Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France, and moved to New York City with her French-Danish mother, Rosa Culmell Nin, and two brothers in 1914. Rosa Culmell was a classical singer and society woman. Nin’s father, the Cuban-born composer-pianist Joaquin Nin, had deserted the family when Anaïs was 11. According to Nin’s memories her father fondled her and he liked to take photos of her while she bathed. In INCEST: FROM “A JOURNAL OF LOVE” (1992) she tells of her lovemaking with her father, after his absence of 20 years.
Nin’s career as a writer started with the publication of D.H. LAWRENCE: AN UNPROFESSIONAL STUDY (1932). It was followed by several books, including her master work HOUSE OF INCEST (1936), a prose poem dealing with psychological torments concerning her relationship with Miller and his wife, June Mansfield.
Nin focused on different female types and followed their lives through lovers, art, and analysis. In the early 1940s she wrote a series of specifically sexual pieces, which were edited and published posthumously as DELTA OF VENUS (1977) and LITTLE BIRDS (1979). The stories in Delta of Venus Nin wrote for a dollar a page in the 1940s.
Although Nin was criticized as a narcissist, the feminist perspective of her works, psychological insight, and her search for self-knowledge made her a popular lecturer in the universities across the U.S.
“So I feel the great changes in the world will come from a great change in our consciousness,” she wrote. Nin died on January 14, 1977, in Los Angeles.”
Source Cited:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/anaisnin.htm
