Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism, and Narrative Identity

Anais Nin is simultaneously one of the most interesting and troubling figures of the Modernist period. Though her provocative diaries, documenting relationships with such renowned figures as Henry Miller and Otto Rank, secured her place in literary history, Nin's writing has yet to attract the critical attention it deserves. With one of the first critical studies to treat Nin's work as a unified whole, Richard-Allerdyce reclaims Nin's writings as she traces the development of Nin's theories of gender and the creative self through her experimental fiction, criticism, and diaries. Nin's struggle for success is presented as part of a long and complex history - that of women's effort to find a means of expressing female experiences in writing. For Nin, the struggle included an attempt to embody a "feminine mode of being" in her writing. Because Nin herself stressed the centrality of gender to her identity, her relation to women's studies and her treatment of gender provide the basis for understanding her work.