Letters to a Friend in Australia
The companion fan-correspondence volume — same habit, another hemisphere.
Read our take
Anaïs Nin Letters
by Anaïs Nin
The mail habit, preserved: a small edited collection of Nin's letters to a young admirer, Moira Collins.
- 2018
About Anaïs Nin
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeOne of the smallest entries on the shelf, and a characteristic one: a 2018 edited collection of the letters Nin wrote to Moira Collins, a young admirer who reached her through the fame-years mail and was answered — repeatedly, seriously, and warmly. Like Letters to a Friend in Australia, the book documents the habit the legend rests on: Nin treated her unknown correspondents as real, and the correspondence that resulted is its own small portrait of the late years. (Letters — nothing to spoil.)
The story, in more detail
The Diary's readers wrote to Nin in extraordinary numbers, and the young women among them got her fullest attention: the questions they brought — how to write, how to live, how to become — were the questions her books existed to answer. The Collins correspondence is one such exchange carried to book length: encouragement, reading advice, and the working philosophy of the lectures delivered person-to-person, without a stage.
Published in 2018 among the small-press wave of Nin recovery, it belongs with the shelf's minor-but-telling documents: not a major correspondence like the Miller or Pollak volumes, but a faithful sample of the thousands of letters that made her, in her last decade, one of literature's great answerers of mail.
What's inside
A short edited run of Nin's letters to Moira Collins: first replies to a fan letter, growing into a correspondence of encouragement and counsel — writing practice, reading lists, the diary habit, and the personal register of the same advice her lecture audiences heard from rows back.
Why we recommend it
The lectures, person-to-person
The counsel of A Woman Speaks delivered to an audience of one.
The habit documented
A faithful sample of the correspondence culture around the late Nin.
Quick and warm
An hour's reading in her most generous register.
What this book explores
Timeline
1970s
A fan letter from Moira Collins is answered, and answered again — the correspondence grows through the fame years.
2018
The edited collection is published.
Book editions
Paperback
- Paperback
- 2018
Reader reviews
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Anaïs Nin Letters: frequently asked questions
What is Anaïs Nin Letters: Her Correspondence with a Young Fan?
A small 2018 edited collection of the letters Nin wrote to Moira Collins, a young admirer whose fan mail she answered and kept answering.
Who is Moira Collins?
A young reader who wrote to Nin during the fame years and became a regular correspondent — the collection preserves Nin's side of the exchange.
What do the letters contain?
Encouragement and practical counsel — on writing, reading, and the diary habit — in the personal register of the advice her lectures gave publicly.
Is this a major Nin volume?
No, and it doesn't pretend to be — it is a minor, telling document of her celebrated habit of answering unknown correspondents seriously.
Where does it fit on the shelf?
Beside Letters to a Friend in Australia, as the second of the fan-correspondence volumes from the late years.