—Paul Herron, Editor

PROLOGUE

I have to begin where everything begins, in the blindness and in the shadows. I have to begin the story of women’s development where all things begin: in nature, at the roots. It is necessary to return to the origin of confusion, which is woman’s struggle to understand her own nature. Man struggled with nature, fought the elements with his objectivity, his inventions, and mastered them. Woman has not been able to organize her own nature, her simoons, her tornadoes, her obscurantisms, because she lacked the eye of consciousness. She was nature. Man did not help her in this because his interpretations, whether psychological, or intellectual, or artistic, did not seize her. And she could not speak for herself.

Today marvelous women speak for themselves in terms of heroic action, integrating the woman, mother, wife, inharmonious relation to history, to larger worlds of art and science. But many more, when entering action or creation, followed man’s patterns and could not carry along or integrate within them the feminine part of themselves. Action and creation, for woman, was man—or an imitation of man. In this imitation of man she lost contact with her nature and her relation to man.

Man appears only partially in this volume, because for the woman at war with herself, he can only appear thus, not as an entity. Woman at war with herself, has not yet been related to man, only to the child in man, being capable only of maternity.

This novel deals with the negative pole, the pole of confused and twisted nature.

The mirrors in the garden are the mirrors women must look into before they can go further. This is only the story of the mirrors and nature in opposition, and in the mirrors is only what woman dares to see...so far an incomplete woman.

—Anaïs Nin, 1946 Dutton edition

THIS HUNGER

LILLIAN WAS ALWAYS in a state of fermentation. Her eyes rent the air and left phosphorescent streaks. Her large teeth were lustful. One thought of a negress who had found a secret potion to turn her skin white and her hair red.

As soon as she came into a room she kicked off her shoes. Necklaces and buttons choked her and she loosened them, scarves strangled her and she slackened them. Her hand bag was always bursting full and often spilled over.

She was always in full movement, in the center of a whirlpool of people, letters, and telephones. She was always poised on the pinnacle of a drama, a problem, a conflict. She seemed to trapeze from one climax to another, from one paroxysm of anxiety to another, skipping always the peaceful region in between, the deserts and the pauses. One marveled that she slept, for this was a suspension of activity. One felt sure that in her sleep she twitched and rolled, and even fell off the bed, or that she slept half sitting up as if caught while still talking. And one felt certain that a great combat had taken place during the night, displacing the covers and pillows.