An extraordinary woman who became famous for her published life journals and erotic works.

She was born Angela, Anis, Juana, Antolina, Rosa, Edelmira, Nin y Culmell on February 21st 1903 in France (Neuilly). To a Father who was both a composer and a pianist named Joaquin Nin and a Mother who was a classically trained Cuban singer.

Life wasn’t always a family affair and after Anais’s Mother and Father’s marriage broke up Anais’s Mother took her and her two brothers to live in New York.

Anais started writing her journals at the age of 11 and only finished them shortly before her death. There are a few that say she lied in her journals but was that just artistic flare or her dream fantasy world? After all she did start them at a very early age and sometimes life is dull; to write an exciting account of her life did she just make it more colourful? At the age of 16 she quit school and started learning from life, she became a model and later in life she studied under Otto Rank, who was trained by Sigmund Freud to work in the field of psychotherapy. 

When her journals were published in the 60’s at the beginning of the feminist movement, women read them and wanted Anais’s life. They left their marriages, wanting to live independently with their own finances and sexuality. Anais had two husbands one that was very wealthy; she always had them around and never really lived a life of total independence.

She tried writing mainstream fiction but she could just not paint the literary picture. She found writing about herself and her desires, with the added flair and excitement of sex and relationships much easier and they rolled from her for over sixty years. However she did have a few fictional books published.

She lived her life with Henry Miller in Paris in 1931 – 1934 but there was no mention of her husband Hugh Parker Guiler whom she had married on March 3rd 1923 at the age of twenty. Anais moved back to New York and she went on to play the part of Astartein the film “Inauguration of the pleasure Dome.”

Yes she had lovers, quite a few famous authors and people in the public eye. The public were upset by the revelation that her diaries were not the whole truth and they turned against her when they should have just accepted that she was human, and that was how she had perceived the things she wrote in the journals, that were deemed so shocking to the point that nobody wanted them.

When she came back to France in her late teens with her Mother and two brothers they had rented an apartment where Anais found some French paperbacks of erotica, she studied them and after reading them all there was nothing she didn’t know about sex. Was this where Anais got her inspiration to write erotica? There were very few female erotic writers at that time but later in her life Anais had been given the title “One of the finest writers of female erotica” by many critics after the publication of her first erotica manuscripts, “Delta of Venus,” and “Little birds.”

She hadn’t intended to publish any of her erotic works that started out as a dollar a page for a silent collector, who demanded all the poetry be removed and she just write the sexual escapades. She always thought that would be the end of it and that the public would never see it.

As she was swept along into adulthood, with marriages and lovers, Anais also had an incest affair with her Father when she was in her 30’s. Much to her Fathers panic she titled one of her books “House of Incest,” her Father thought she had written a story about their affair but it wasn’t at all, it was about the burdens of life and how she tried to escape the dream in which she was trapped.

A film in 1990 was made about Anais’s novel, “Henry and June,” in the film she was portrayed as having relations with June but this never happened, She was a long time friend and lover of Henry Miller the famous American novelist and artist and nor was her Husband Hugh Guiler a push over, as he was portrayed in the film, it seemed he knew what was going on with Anais but chose to ignore it but he only found out she had married Rupert Pole, sixteen years her junior at the age of 44 in 1955 after her death in 1977. Soon after Anais’s first husband Guiler in 1985 died, Pole her second unlawful husband commissioned her journals with no censorship.  

There still goes on the augments about her life, whether she was evil, a feminist or troubled throughout but at the end of the day she was a literary genius no matter what she wrote about, she was an artist and as with most artistic people she was very emotional and passionate. She was noble and always trying to help young writer friends. Some people have a very blinkered outlook when they think about what or how a woman should write but should we be so stilted in this day and age of equal opportunities.