The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1927–1931

The apprenticeship ends here, and it ends with real accomplishments: the dance years, pursued seriously enough for a stage name (Anita Aguilera) and real performances, gave Nin the physical vocabulary her fiction never stopped using; and D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, drafted in these pages and published in 1932, made her — improbably, at twenty-eight, in her first book — one of Lawrence's earliest serious defenders. The diary records both pursuits with the old intensity and a new confidence.

The volume's real subject, though, is readiness. The bourgeois marriage of the previous volume is still the frame, but everything inside it is straining — the reading, the Lawrence obsession, the avant-garde acquaintances, the house at Louveciennes taken and furnished like a stage set waiting for its play. The early diary ends in the autumn of 1931 with the instrument tuned and the player seated. Readers can go straight from its last page to the first page of the Diary and hear the music start.

Paris and Louveciennes, 1927–1931: the Spanish dance training and performances under the name Anita Aguilera; the decision between stage and page; the discovery of D. H. Lawrence and the writing of the study that became her first book; the move to Louveciennes and the making of the famous house; the marriage holding its shape while its occupant outgrows it; and the diary, now fully the instrument of the mature volumes, recording the approach of a life about to arrive.