Incest: From a Journal of Love

Plot summary

The book covers the conclusion of her and Henry's relationship with June, as well as her relationships with her analysts. Among other events, she re-establishes contact and begins a sexual relationship with her absent father Joaquín Nin, becomes pregnant with Miller's child and eventually has an abortion in her sixth month of pregnancy. She examines all of these events with a sharp eye through the filters of psychoanalysis, and herself becomes an experiment for psychoanalysis by symbolically appointing her husband Hugh Guiler as her father, Henry Miller as her husband, and her father as her lover.

Influences

Nin was in the midst of the surrealism movement, the psychoanalysis movement, and the expatriate community in Paris, and these intellectual influences upon her are evident in her diary entries. As well as providing a personal record of events, her diaries also chronicle the writing of various works including the novella Djuna from Winter of Artifice and Alraune which was later titled House of Incest. She edited Henry Miller's famous novel Tropic of Cancer, over which she wielded considerable influence.

Editions

Anaïs Nin first began publishing expurgated versions of The Diary of Anaïs Nin in 1966, omitting many details of her personal and love life. In 1986, after virtually everybody mentioned in her diaries had died, Rupert Pole, Nin's widower, began to publish what are now termed the "unexpurgated" versions of the diary. The "unexpurgated" versions of the diaries are more sexually frank than the versions published in the 1960s and 1970s, and provide a fuller picture of her life. The new material casts her incestuous relationship with her father and her relationship with Henry Miller in new light.

References

References

1. Nin, Anaïs. (1993). "Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1932–1934". Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
2. "Incest: from 'A Journal of Love' : Anais Nin : 9780156443005". The Book Depository Ltd. UK.