Anais was a free spirited, independent woman, in an artistic milieu, with an incredible passion for life that was beyond the scope of her time. She was the only woman of that time who wrote prose and wrote it she did. Her eloquence and style tugged at the heart strings and influenced women who read her words for decades. Her diaries have been an inspiration to women all over the world spanning 60 plus years.

I first began reading her Diaries in the mid 60's. A writer by the name of John Locke gave me one, told me it was incredible and the rest is history....

I was hooked!

I bought not only every one of her Diaries, but everything else I could get my hands on.

I was already a fan of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durell so of course Anais fit right in and added more color to the already colorful pair.

Her first publication in France was a defense of D.H. Lawrence, the first book on Lawrence by a woman.

In 1934 she prefaced Henry Miller's book, "Tropic of Cancer", when no one else would dare.

If you remember, Henry's first three books were banned in the United states for obscenity. These days, the books of this famous threesome are considered sensual, not pornographic.

Anaïs's book, "The Winter of Artiface", was published in 1949 at the same time that Lawrence Durell's 'Black Book' and Henry Miller's 'Black Spring' were published.

During the war, she was unable to get any of her books published, as no publisher would touch her ~ too risque and not befitting of a woman! Oh, my!

She refused to let the short sightedness of men stop her. She bought a second hand, foot operated printing press and handset and printed her own works.

"Cities of the Interior", the title of Anais Nin's "continuous novel," contained six books of which I sadly, only have  two of these original printings.

They contained:

* The Ladders To Fire
* Children of the Albatross
* The Four-Chambered Heart
* A Spy in the House of Love
* Solar Barque (which became a part of the later
'Seduction of the Minotaur')

If any one is lucky enough to have the whole collection, they are fortunate, indeed.

Anaïs Nin was one of the first, if not the first, to completely expose herself as nakedly as she did, and reveal what so many women were taught not to feel, let alone act upon. And yes, if we did think, let alone act on those feelings, we were looked upon with contempt not only by men, but also by our own sisterhood of women.

Anaïs' words proved inspirational to me as they affirmed my own inner feelings that women have intelligent thoughts and don't have to "go with the flow" and are not any less of a woman because of it. This is not because of some essentialist biological difference from men but, rather, because there are many ways in which our socialization and experiences differ.

What woman of her time, or since then, had ever radiated such bravado. She had the courage, not only to live life, but to expose it, and not only in her dairies.

When I began reading her diaries, in 1966, I was completely taken with the fact that I shared the same thoughts and feelings as the woman had displayed thirty years prior. She had done this at a time when women were so debased by men and society in general, that having revealed such thoughts would never have been considered.

She left us a record of a woman who struggled against the repression of the so called "female condition," as it was so inappropriately label by society at the time, and the onslaught of "the feminist movement," as it was labeled during my time of the 60's "womens feminist" movement. She accomplished this on her own, in the way she lived her life and the privacy of her journals. She alone had that courage to live her life as she deemed right.

She gave women the courage to "wear purple" before they got old.

Anaïs Nin has been hailed, all over the world by critics as one of the finest writers of female erotica. "She was one of the first women to really explore the realm of erotic writing, and certainly the first prominent woman in modern Europe to write erotica. Before her, erotica written by women was rare, with a few notable exception such as the work of Kate Chopin," according to Wikipedia.

What this unknown author neglects to mention is the beauty and eloquence of the style of the prose with which she wrote, and the emotion the woman was able to portray with her words in her dairies.

In Volume I of her diaries, 1931-1934, Anaïs writes that she first encountered erotica in her teens when she had returned to Paris from America with her mother and two brothers.

They had sub-leased a flat of an American man who was leaving Paris for the summer, but didn't want to give up the flat. This worked out perfectly for the Nin family.

While spending the summer in the bachelors' flat, Anaïs occupied the teenage boredom she was experiencing by reading a number of French erotica paperbacks, she had discovered.

"One by one, I read these books, which were completely new to me. I had never read erotic literature in America.... They overwhelmed me. I was innocent before I read them, but by the time I had read them all, there was nothing I did not know about sexual exploits... I had my degree in erotic lore." writes Anais.

For the artists and expatriates, the aristocrats and arrivistes, Paris in the 1930s lost none of its magical allure, as this lavishly illustrated chronicle of a fascinating decade in the city's cultural history shows. This book is a social history of the decade that took Paris, its avant-garde artists, & celebrated expatriates to the brink of the Second World War. Despite the stock market crash of 1929. At salons, galleries, palaces, and cafes, Henry Miller, Helena Rubinstein, Anais Nin, Coco Chanel, Salvador Dali, and Katherine Anne Porter joined illustrious exiles of the twenties like Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Pablo Picasso, Janet Flanner, and Man Ray.

Jazz orchestrated the city nights, surrealism flourished, haute couture reinvented itself. James Joyce redefined modern literature with Finnegans Wake and at her Chez Josephine Baker redefined the derriere. In a lively narrative, which is accompanied by a superb selection of period photographs, the award-winning author William Wiser follows Elsa Schiaparelli, T. S. Eliot, Peggy Guggenheim, the Windsors, Collette, Jean Cocteau, and a host of other colorful celebrities and literary luminaries through the ten years that continued to foster the creative revolution of the expatriate era in Paris--an era that began extravagantly with Elsa Maxwell's famous masquerade ball and ended with perhaps the grimmest event in modern French history: the fall of Paris and the Nazi occupation in 1940.

These were the people that were the friends and companions of Anais at the time.

The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s