The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1920–1923

The language shift is the volume's quiet landmark: around 1920 the diary moves into English, and readers can watch the future stylist trying her instrument — earnest, literary, overwrought, and improving by the month. The content is a American girlhood on the economic margin: the Richmond Hill household, the family finances, and Nin's stint as an artist's model, the first time her looks and composure became a working asset and the diary's first brush with the observed self she would spend a lifetime writing.

The heart of the volume is the courtship. Hugh Guiler — Hugo — arrives as a neighbor's introduction and becomes the diary's central deliberation: hundreds of pages weighing love, poverty, ambition, and safety with a thoroughness no novelist would dare give a heroine. It ends with their marriage in Havana in 1923. Readers of the famous Diary, where Guiler was edited out at his own request, meet here the man the later silence conceals — and the version of Anaïs who chose him.

1920–1923 in New York and Havana: the switch to English; school abandoned for the household economy; modeling for painters and magazine illustrators; the Cuban relatives and the two-country identity; first literary attempts and the diary's growing self-awareness; and the long courtship with Hugh Guiler conducted against money worries and family counsel, closing with the wedding that ends her girlhood and the volume together.