Anais: The Erotic Life of Anais Nin by Noel Riley Fitch is a 525-page hardcover published by Little, Brown and Company, 1993, stated first edition. The dust jacket is mildly creased along the top edge and there is some light shelf wear along the top and bottom edges. The hardbound cover is gilt impressed on a navy blue and cream colored paper cover. The pages are crisp and clean and tight with the exception of pages 222 and 223 where the pages are starting to pull away from the binding but still attached. There is a light crease along the spine, that is also slightly bumped along the tail.
Anais Nin was the ultimate femme fatale, a passionate and mysterious woman, world famous for her steamy love affairs and extravagant sexual exploits, most notably her simultaneous affairs with Henry and June Miller and her bicoastal bigamous marriages. In the mid-1920s, eager the break the confines of American Victorianism both as an artist and as a woman, Nin traveled to Paris, where she fell in the with legendary artistic and literary circles of the Left Bank. For the rest of her long life she lived as a liberated woman--an author of more than a dozen books of fiction and erotica, and uninhibited lover of both men and women, and an independent figure within the avant-garde worlds of Paris, Los Angeles, and New York.
Nin's Diary, published over the years in numerous volumes, has been hailed as a breakthrough document by literary critics and feminists alike. It is studied in universities across the country, and Kate Millett called it "the first real portrait of the artist as a woman." Yet in the published diary, for all its elaborate detail, Nin did not lay bare her true self. She instead constructed herself for her imagined readers, presenting on those pages a carefully stylized image of the woman the world knew as "Anais" while keeping her inner self hidden in a literary labyrinth of mirrors.
Now, in Anais, the first intimate examination of Nin's life, biographer Noel Riley Finch presents an honest portrait of Nin's passionate, tumultuous, and sometimes bitterly painful life.
ISBN: 0-316-28428-9
