1993 DELTA OF VENUS/LITTLE BIRDS BY ANAIS NIN

 “At the time (1941) we were all writing erotica at a dollar a page, I realized that for centuries we had only one model for this literary genre — the writing of man. I was already conscious of the difference between the masculine and feminine treatment of sexual experience.

I know that there was a great disparity between Henry Miller’s explicitness and my ambiguities — between his humorous, Rabelaisian view of sex and my poetic descriptions of sexual relationships in the unpublished portions of the Diary.

As I wrote in Volume Three of the Diary,  I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of women’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate.  

Women, I thought, were more apt to fuse sex with emotion, with love, and to single out one man rather than be promiscuous.

This became apparent to me as I wrote the novels and the Diary, and I saw it even more clearly when I began to teach. But although women’s attitude towards sex was quite distinct form that of men, we had not yet learned how to write about it.

Here in the erotica I was writing to entertain, under pressure form a client who wanted me to “leave out the poetry.”

I believed that my style was derived from a reading of men’s works. For this reason I long felt that I had compromised my feminine self. I put the erotica aside.

Rereading it these many years later I see that my own voice was not completely suppressed In numerous passages I was intuitively using a woman’s language, seeing sexual experience from a woman’s point of view.

I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men.”

About the Author: Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she wrote primarily fiction until 1964, when her last novel, Collages, was published. She wrote The House of Incest, a prose-poem (1936), three novellas collected in The Winter of Artifice (1939), short stories collected in Under a Glass Bell (1944), and a five-volume continuous novel consisting of Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). These novels were collected as Cities of the Interior (1974). She gained commercial and critical success with the publication of the first volume of her diary (1966); to date, fifteen diary volumes have been published. Her most commercially successful books were her erotica published as Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979). Today, her books are appearing digitally, most notably with the anthology