#the early diary of anais nin

[petaltexturedskies]

Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1920-1923

[mournfulroses]

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1903-1977

[namitha]

Create a world, your world. .

As Anais nin said don't wait for it. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you.🌻

.

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

" The tender, unearthly magic of the Spring has crept into my heart. I hear the song of birds, I smell new odors, see new colorings, and the softness of the air melts me.

And I feel. Oh, GOd, how deeply I feel ... "

- Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary

📷 mine

[t0rschlusspan1k]

I am too fond of dreaming. Is it because reality seems to me too sad? I am afraid so.

― Anaïs Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914–1920  

[rosepompadour]

I am very old fashioned, as if in reading all the books I have read there had developed in me a strange mixture of all the qualities and faults of girls of other centuries, which have become a part of myself.

Anais Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary (February 13, 1920)

[lovesickbrat]

What are the recommended works of literature by the coquette community?

well im glad u asked here are some books NOT on coquette booktok (and one that is)

u have to read lolita by nabokov thats what kickstarted the subculture a difficult but beautiful read nabokov is a true word smith and theres only one other author who crafts imagery on his level

and that author is TONI MORRISON. if you want a book on female friendships, isolation, magical realism and truly unhinged female characters read sula. this is my favorite book of alllll time truly nothing comes close at all the titular character is so interesting is blunt and sensual and odd just like her best friend nel and this is a book i have to read to truly experience

if you loved lolita and want a story similar but about black girls read the bluest eye. this has two major TWs of csa and rape but toni does an amazing job at unpacking generational trauma, cruelty, colorism and desirability and how that effects young black girls esp dark skin black girls. i recommend it to non black coquettes all the time bc some (a lot) of them need to learn some empathy for their black sisters

bonkour tristesse is a quick summer read written by an actual 17 year old in the 1960s about a young girl living a bohemian life with her father until he behins dating her deceased mothers best friend and and she does anything she can to stop it. i read this in a day it was so fun and the author being a teen when she wrote it gives the main character and interesting voice

the moth diaries which i just finished like 4-5 hrs ago is a sapphic gothic novel set in a boarding and day school focusing on the boarding students and their isolated existence its really good def a psychological thriller and you’re left unsure what is real and what is the unnammed narrators psychosis. you can feel her slowly losing her sanity on the pages

stolen by lucy christopher is an older YA novel abt a young girl kidnapped by an older handsome man who she develops stockholm syndrome for. its told with the framing device of a letter its all in past tense and its set in the australian desert so lots of tension here

a book i just started but im already finding interesting in innocents by cathy cootes about a young australian girl who traps her teacher in a relationship and u are nottttt supposed to like this girl but ur intrigued by her shes very demented LOL

audition by ryu murakami is what the infamous movie is based on iykyk if not its about a man who holds “auditions” for the perfect girlfriend and instead gets a psychotic young woman

la batarde by violette leduc is a 1960s autobiography about a woman who reflects on how being born out of wedlock tainted the rest of her life

little birds and delta of venus by anais nin are a series of erotic short stories she wrote for a dollar a page on 1940s france for legal reasons i recommend this to ppl 18+

their eyes were watching god is an absolutely stunning take on black girlhood and womanhood set in early 1900s written in the black floridian dialect at the time it does so well at preserving that culture and showing the trials of being a black woman and its a very romantic and lush book one of my favs

o caledonia which is a gothic scottish book set in the 1940s it opens with the death of the main character and we follow the journey it takes her to get there and it’s supremely haunting

the blacker the berry another tale of black girlhood this time in the northern american stares in the early 1900s very insightful tale of a young woman dealing with love and coming of age as a dark skin woman

the lover the (mostly) true auto biography by maurgarite duras about her time in saigon as a poor french teen and the complexities of relationship with an older vietnamese man as well as her complicated interactions with her family & (sexual) feelings for her best friend

flowers in the attic a classic gothic tale about a young woman who is forced to live in the attic of her familys large estate with her 3 siblings and its as bad as u think it is

we have always lived in the castle is a gothic mystery about the 3 surviving blackwoods and the incident 6 years prior that isolated them from the town

emma by jane austen is a classic truly we all know it we all love it and even i enjoyed it and im a perpetual reader of doom and gloom

lady chatterlys lover is one of the most notorious victims of britans whole obscenity thing and its about a relationship between an upperclass woman and a working class man

wuthering heights is another gothic classic i highly suggest reading

and these are (some of) the more underrated books ive seen in my p much 10 years of being here the coquette literature canon is always expanding and growing

and fuck sylvia plath 🫶🏽

[shisasan]

December 1927 The early diary of Anaïs Nin, 1903-1977 [Anais Nin about the movie “Metropolis” (1927) directed by Fritz Lang]

[neverneverland]

I am too fond of dreaming. Is it because reality seems to me too sad? I am afraid so.

― Anais Nin, The Early Diary of Anais Nin.

[byronsmuse]

To be capable of imagining! What a world of power lies in the one word. I imagine... and in one bound my mind is freed from earthly fetters. It no longer hurls itself against locked doors; it soars along vast stretches of spacious, endless imaginings, it flies, it roams, it expands... And then, to dream is to see through the appearance of things, where truth alone can dwell, for truth is ever hidden and disguised, and to see truth is to see goodness, and to see goodness is to see all beauty, all perfectio... the ideal. As others are saved by their sense of humor, I am saved by my idealism.

Anais Nin, The Early Diaries Volume 2 (1920-23)

[papillonnne2]

The Early Diary of Anais Nin

“Do you know what I would answer to someone who asked me for a description of myself, in a hurry??

This:

For indeed my life is a perpetual question mark--my thirst for books, my observations of people, all tend to satisfy a great, overwhelming desire to know, to understand, to find an answer to a million questions. And gradually the answers are revealed, many things are explained, and above all, many things are given names and described, and my restlessness is subdued. Then I become an exclamatory person, clapping my hands to the immense surprises the world holds for me, and falling from one ecstasy into another. I have the habit of peeping and prying and listening and seeking--passionate curiosity and expectation. But I have also the habit of being surprised, the habit of being filled with wonder and satisfaction each time I stumble on some wondrous thing. The first habit could make me a philosopher or a cynic or perhaps a humorist. But the other habit destroys all the delicate foundations, and I find each day that I am still...only a Woman!”

[petaltexturedskies]

I shall live on dreams because reality is too cruel for me. I think I shall be the kind of person that nobody understands,

Anaïs Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920

[mournfulroses]

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1903-1977

[namitha]

Spring evening, soft and balmy and beautiful. The smell of the earth rose in the stillness like a dream cloud.

🌿 Anais Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1920–1923

.

[boricuacherry-blog]

Anais Nin, born Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was the daughter of Cuban expats living in France. Though her early life was spent living in Spain and France, her family moved to the United States was when she was young. In spite of her love of literature, she dropped out of high school at sixteen to be an artist's model for money. Her father had left the family, leaving them almost destitute and forcing Anais to be a second mother to her two brothers while helping her mother earn money. During this time she met and married her first husband, wealthy banker Hugh Parker Guiler. Together they moved to Paris in 1923. There she began what would become her diaries. Guiler did not wish to be part of her published works and so his presence had mostly been edited out of the diaries. Nin had an interest in psychoanalysis which led to an affair with prominent psychoanalyst Otto Rank as well as several patients when she herself worked as a practicing psychoanalyst. She also published a critic of author D.H. Lawrence.

It was also during this time that Nin met Henry Miller. Miller was attempting and failing to support himself as a writer. As a huge fan of his work, Nin began financially supporting Miller using money from her husband and from Otto Rank. Nin supported Miller throughout the 30s and had an affair throughout much of this time, which is detailed in her journals. She believed Miller to be the father of the fetus she aborted in the 40s.

In addition to providing food and housing for Miller, she also financed the publication of Tropic of Cancer, effectively launching his career. After that, she became a sought-after friend to struggling artists who were eager to make her acquaintance, impress her, and hopefully benefit from her generosity when it came to supporting work she loved.

In 1936, Nin published her first fictional work, House of Incest. Though it was later revealed in a posthumous unexpurgated diary that Nin had been sexually abused by her father as a child and later had a sexual relationship with him in her thirties, the premise of the seventy-two page novel was an exploration of the incestuous and conceited self-love that allows people to only love in others the things they recognize as being similar to themselves. Largely allegorical and symbolic, the novel is influenced by Nin's experience with psychoanalysis.

Since the publication of her diary detailing her real life experience with incest and the knowledge that the novel was written during the time she was engaging in an incestuous relationship with her father as an adult, it has become increasingly common for modern critics to read more into the symbolism of the novel as it pertains to her experience with incest. Simultaneously, Nin wrote the manuscript that would become Winter of Artifice.

In 1947, she met Rupert Pole, who she would become married to, unbeknownst to her still-husband Guiler, and Nin began what she referred to as a "bicoastal trapeze." Nin's marriage with Pole was later annulled, but they continued their relationship.

In the 60s, the feminist movement sparked a new interest in Nin as a diarist and fiction writer, and she was invited to speak at universities across the world, though as recently as 1954 she had thrown a book release party in which none of the critics she had invited showed up. Publishers that had rejected her for years were seeking her out and essays were published exploring her work. She began publishing her erotic fiction, some of which she had written years earlier.

In 1977, Nin passed away from cervical cancer at the height of her popularity. A small scandal broke out when two newspapers in her two different cities of residence published conflicting obituaries stating two different grieving husbands. It was later revealed through letters that while Guiler did not know for some time, she had written him a letter of apology, and he had responded with forgiveness and a comment on how much meaning she had brought to his life.

-Adrienne Rivera

[t0rschlusspan1k]

Life can no longer have any charm for me and I think that dreams, which so far have helped me to live, will be my only guide. And in moments of the deepest distress, I close my eyes and go to faraway lands where nothing can trouble the happy life that, so it seems, carries me...

Anaïs Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914–1920