D.H. Lawrence.
Nin, Anaïs. D.H. Lawrence. An unprofessional study. With two facsimile manuscript pages out of Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Paris: Edward W. Titus, 1932.
8vo.; faint foxing to endpapers; black cloth stamped in gilt; gilt lightly rubbed; dust-jacket; spine and edges browned; small round stain to spine; extremities nicked. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition, 550 press-numbered copies (this is copy #150), the final 50 of which were reserved for the press; the entire edition of Nin’s first book. Franklin A1a. The only review devoted to the volume was, Nin said, “patronizing and revoltingly sexist,” as is, in fact, the blurb from John Erskine on the cover of the dust-jacket: “I learned a great deal from it. I am amazed at the scholarly and critical reaches—which theoretically no woman should possess.” Years later, while undergoing psychoanalysis, Nin recalled bitterly “the lamentable story of DHL book published by Titus a few months before his business went bankrupt, the book only partially distributed, half lost, not sent to reviewers and no royalties.”
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Mrs. Mabel Scott with the cordial friendship of Anaïs Nin. Paris March 1932.
Feminist writer and critic Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) is best known for her intimate friendships with Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Gore Vidal, and for her place in a circle that included Durrell, Antonin Artaud, Alfred Perlès, and Michael Fraenkel. Born and raised, until the age of 11, in France, Nin was largely self-educated in the public libraries of New York City and her writing—which, until the late 1960s, was largely self-published—was influenced by surrealism and psychoanalysis, and markedly by the psychiatrists René Allendy and Otto Rank.
Though she published nearly a dozen books of fiction and essays throughout her career—some illustrated by her husband, Hugh Guiler, under the pseudonym Ian Hugo—only one novel could be described as popular: The Spy in the House of Love (1954). Of her other works, many were experimental, and though praised by individual critics in small circles they were less than ideally suited for mass-consumption. These include the surrealistic prose-poem The House of Incest (1936); Collages (1964), a “loosely structured novel in the form of a series of sketches”; Cities of the Interior, “a continuous novel in five parts” (1946-1961); and Delta of Venus (1977), a selection of erotica written during the 1940s.
Her body of work was given serious attention with the publication of her diaries, which today constitute an important document of the pre- and post-war aesthetic avant-garde. It appeared in six volumes from 1966-76; Linotte, the entries kept between the ages of 11 and 17, was published posthumously in 1978. According to the preface to Realism and Reality, Nin at one time planned to “convert and transpose” her diaries “‘into a full, long novel of the thirty years between 1914 and 1944—between two wars.’ Among the themes will be the artistic life of Paris, the drama of psychoanalysis, the transition from romanticism to realism, the birth and death of surrealism, and woman in her relationship to the present-day world” (p. 8).
Nin’s first book, an informal but in-depth study and the first book about Lawrence by a woman, grew out of close readings and animated investigations into his works which she and her husband, Hugh Guiler, performed, and from the heated discussions that followed from their findings. (Ironically, this volume brought to Nin’s door Henry Miller, whose interest in Lawrence was also profound and life-long.) Deidre Bair reports, “with a sheaf of notes on Lawrence’s fiction, and unable to concentrate on any other form of writing long enough to finish it, she decided to go ahead with an essay” (p. 98). This essay became “an unprofessional study,” encompassing inquiries into Lawrence’s writing and ideas and, significantly, their application in Nin’s own li
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