{Wonder Woman Series #5} Anaïs Nin

Good day dolls! I hope the sunshine has come to you all as it has here. We've been happily baking in the warmth. I thought it was time for another 'Wonder Woman' post...many of you may know Anaïs Nin & have read her works. I highly recommend to do so if you haven't. You can read many of her quotes as well as her work and find a world so rich and deep in thought and feeling that you can't help but be compelled by her...well it's how I feel anyways. Many of her words have inspired me in my life and journey of self-discovery, I enjoy women who have something to say & not just something frivolous, but something that hits at the core of your being. I enjoy having a laugh and talking about silly things, but what really gets me is deep feelings and emotions, thoughts about life. And you can't escape that when reading Anaïs' work. These are some of my favourite quotes of hers, though so many left out or we'd be here all day & quick bio. I hope you enjoy her & venture into her books and world very soon!!

Have a marvellous day dolls!!

Loves & Loves

xoxoxoxoxoxoxox

Anaïs Nin was born in France. Her father was the composer Joaquin Nin, who grew up in Spain but was born in and returned to Cuba. Her mother, Rosa Culmell y Vigaraud, was of Cuban, French, and Danish ancestry. Anaïs moved to the United States in 1914 after her father deserted the family. In the United States she attended Catholic schools, dropped out of school, worked as a model and dancer, and returned to Europe in 1923.

She studied psychoanalysis with Otto Rank and briefly practiced as a lay therapist in New York. She was a patient of Carl Jung for a time as well. Finding it difficult to get her erotic stories published, Anaïs Nin helped found Siana Editions in France in 1935. By 1939 and the outbreak of World War II she returned to New York, where she became a figure in the Greenwich Village crowd.

An obscure literary figure for most of her life, when her journals -- kept since 1931 -- began to be published in 1966, Anaïs entered the public eye. The ten volumes of 'The Diary of Anaïs Nin' have remained popular. These are more than simple diaries; each volume has a theme, and were likely written with the intent that they later be published. Letters she exchanged with intimate friends, including Henry Miller, have also been published. The popularity of the diaries brought interest in her previously-published novels. The Delta of Venus and Little Birds, originally written in the 1940's, were published after her death (1977, 1979).

Anaïs is known, as well, for her lovers, who included Henry Miller, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal and Otto Rank. She was married to Hugh Guiler of New York who tolerated her affairs. She also entered into a second, bigamous marriage to Rupert Pole in California. She had the marriage annulled about the time she was achieving more widespread fame. She was living with Pole at the time of her death, and he saw to the publication of a new edition of her diaries, unexpurgated.

From being a cult figure of the early feminist movement, Anaïs later rose to international prominence with her writing. She is best known for her diaries, 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 her diary, vol. 1, 1966), but she also produced a number of novels and a prose poem in surrealistic style as well as wonderful erotic short stories, published posthumously. She was largely ignored until the 1960's; Characterized by the use of powerful and, at times, disquieting imagery, her work reveals great sensitivity and perception. In 1973, she received an honorary doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974.

The ideas of Anaïs about "masculine" and "feminine" natures have influenced that part of the feminist movement known as "difference feminism." She disassociated herself late in her life from the more political forms of feminism, believing that self-knowledge through journaling was the source of personal liberation. She died on January 14th, 1977 after a three year battle with cancer. 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. 

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

'It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.'

“Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

♥

{All images & info found via research on the internet}