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The Woman with One Hundred Faces: The Lives and Legacy of Anaïs Nin
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Expected 12 Jan 27Win a free print copy of this book!
20 days and 17:15:28
45 copies available
U.S. only
Who was Anaïs Nin? To some, she was a towering literary figure, whose late life fame following the publication of her diaries changed the reading habits of a generation. To others, she was a failed novelist, better known for her affair with Henry Miller. Readers might know her best for her dollar-a-page erotica, never intended for publication; or celebrate her for her journals and avant-garde fiction, powerful statements of a woman's right to artistry. Achieving a cult following in the last decade of her life, her reputation took a shocking posthumous knock when she was revealed to be a bigamist, a fantasist, a compulsive liar and an incestuous daughter.
Katherine Rowland's new biography is an unflinching, empathetic account of Nin's life, and a reckoning with her wild legacy. From this book emerges a figure who was a lover, a tyrant, an exploiter, a victim, but above all things, a writer.
Katherine Rowland's new biography is an unflinching, empathetic account of Nin's life, and a reckoning with her wild legacy. From this book emerges a figure who was a lover, a tyrant, an exploiter, a victim, but above all things, a writer.
- GenresBiography
Kindle Edition
Expected publication January 12, 2027
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This full and empathetic biography of Anais Nin is a necessary corrective to some of the former ways she has been packaged and her legacy put into circulation: the Fitch biography, Anais: The Erotic Life Of Anais Nin, which I read some years ago, focuses - as the title indicates - on Nin's sexual life, drawing its emphasis, apparently, from her most well-known writings, the erotica in Delta of Venus and Little Birds which Nin never intended for publication. I'd also previously known Nin, as I'm sure is quite common, from Henry and June, another pre-packaged selection from the wider diaries that focus on Nin's sexual awakening and multiple affairs with June and Henry Miller, as well as various other men. It's not that these works don't tell us something of Nin - it's that they were edited and marketed for purely commercial reasons by her husband, Rupert Pole, after she died, and are selective in focusing on material that was thought likely to sell because of its salacious and scandalous nature.
Excised from Nin's fuller diaries that she worked on throughout her life, these prior selections excluded aspects of Nin that are not sexual and which now Rowland recuperates and gives attention to in this biography: Nin's struggles to deal with her traumatic relationship with her father, her literary ambitions, her struggles to conform to ideas of femininity in the early half of the twentieth century, her inability to settle for a single self, her complicated and ambivalent refusal of motherhood, most of all, her sense of being a writer - not as a goal but reflecting her purpose and the way she transcribed her life and all her facets of self, constantly, in her diaries and journals - she didn't want to be a writer, she was a writer... but in a time when diaries weren't seen as a legitimate mode of literary expression, especially when the life being articulated was female.
Rowland has done us all a service in attending to the whole of the Nin archive, and her work is meticulously sourced and annotated (about 200 pages at the end is notes and references). It places the sex, the love affairs, the entanglements with inappropriate men all within a wider context of Nin's life and passion for writing. Her concerns with interiority and subjectivity extend beyond the sexual (though even her erotica remains startling for the emphasis on female sensuality, desire, pleasure, and viewpoint) and place her within modernist aesthetic from which she is more usually excluded.
Reading this made me realise, uncomfortably, why I myself had been judgy of Nin when reading the Fitch biography: shorn of context and taken out of a cultural, historical and personal framework, Fitch's Nin was a woman with not enough to fill her days other than with solipsistic, narcissistic love affairs. I'm so glad to be corrected. Re-meeting Nin through Rowland, helps to make sense of the fragmented writings that had previously been made available, along with the agenda behind them. What we now have is a fuller, more rounded, and illuminating life of a woman who struggled with the constraints of gender within which she lived and who refused to be tied down to being a single entity: wife, muse, mistress, or writer.
Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley
Excised from Nin's fuller diaries that she worked on throughout her life, these prior selections excluded aspects of Nin that are not sexual and which now Rowland recuperates and gives attention to in this biography: Nin's struggles to deal with her traumatic relationship with her father, her literary ambitions, her struggles to conform to ideas of femininity in the early half of the twentieth century, her inability to settle for a single self, her complicated and ambivalent refusal of motherhood, most of all, her sense of being a writer - not as a goal but reflecting her purpose and the way she transcribed her life and all her facets of self, constantly, in her diaries and journals - she didn't want to be a writer, she was a writer... but in a time when diaries weren't seen as a legitimate mode of literary expression, especially when the life being articulated was female.
Rowland has done us all a service in attending to the whole of the Nin archive, and her work is meticulously sourced and annotated (about 200 pages at the end is notes and references). It places the sex, the love affairs, the entanglements with inappropriate men all within a wider context of Nin's life and passion for writing. Her concerns with interiority and subjectivity extend beyond the sexual (though even her erotica remains startling for the emphasis on female sensuality, desire, pleasure, and viewpoint) and place her within modernist aesthetic from which she is more usually excluded.
Reading this made me realise, uncomfortably, why I myself had been judgy of Nin when reading the Fitch biography: shorn of context and taken out of a cultural, historical and personal framework, Fitch's Nin was a woman with not enough to fill her days other than with solipsistic, narcissistic love affairs. I'm so glad to be corrected. Re-meeting Nin through Rowland, helps to make sense of the fragmented writings that had previously been made available, along with the agenda behind them. What we now have is a fuller, more rounded, and illuminating life of a woman who struggled with the constraints of gender within which she lived and who refused to be tied down to being a single entity: wife, muse, mistress, or writer.
Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley
September 1, 2026
The Woman with One Hundred Faces: The Lives and Legacy of Anaïs Nin by Katherine Rowland is a wonderful, thoughtful, balanced and compelling biography.
The manner of care, consideration and empathy of Rowland are evident and essential throughout this beautifully written book. Nin is revealed in a balanced way that is free from the fetters of judgment. Rowland calls on the reader to similarly suspend their own judgments and to make the effort to hold the complexities and contradictions of a nuanced individual with compassion. (See: actor-observer bias.) Rowland presents a wealth of context and content without overwhelming the reader, and in doing so seems to capture an essential essence of Anaïs Nin.
Rowland writes poetic and gracefully flowing prose, with vivid, eloquent descriptions and illuminating analogies. The author’s writing is complementary to the subjects’, and the two intertwine to recreate a moving and holistic vision of Nin’s life, including her relationships, her writing, and the deep river of her emotions and experiences.
I appreciate this book particularly for the truth that is not yet evident to all - that women are not just diminutive men and many have rich, complex, and not necessarily harmonious lives - welcome to humanity.
A great many thanks to NetGalley, Crown Publishing and author Katherine Rowland for access to a digital ARC. All opinions are my own.
Expected Publication Date: January 12, 2027
The manner of care, consideration and empathy of Rowland are evident and essential throughout this beautifully written book. Nin is revealed in a balanced way that is free from the fetters of judgment. Rowland calls on the reader to similarly suspend their own judgments and to make the effort to hold the complexities and contradictions of a nuanced individual with compassion. (See: actor-observer bias.) Rowland presents a wealth of context and content without overwhelming the reader, and in doing so seems to capture an essential essence of Anaïs Nin.
Rowland writes poetic and gracefully flowing prose, with vivid, eloquent descriptions and illuminating analogies. The author’s writing is complementary to the subjects’, and the two intertwine to recreate a moving and holistic vision of Nin’s life, including her relationships, her writing, and the deep river of her emotions and experiences.
I appreciate this book particularly for the truth that is not yet evident to all - that women are not just diminutive men and many have rich, complex, and not necessarily harmonious lives - welcome to humanity.
A great many thanks to NetGalley, Crown Publishing and author Katherine Rowland for access to a digital ARC. All opinions are my own.
Expected Publication Date: January 12, 2027
July 27, 2026
This book is a good read for anyone who is a fan of Anais Nin. It’s a memoir of her life and how she writes. I love reading her diaries and quotes. Anais is a brilliant writer and diarist.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews