For many years women were not supposed to enjoy sex, let alone write about it. In honor of Women’s History Month, we’ll look at several famous women who used their female sexuality as an important part of their art.
French-born writer, Anais Nin, is considered one of the finest female erotic authors. She was also a diarist, living among famous intellectual men of the 1940s and writing about her relationship with them. But, like Kate Chopin before her, it is Nin’s erotica that broke new ground for other women to write about their sexuality, especially during a time when women were not really considered sexual beings.
Nin, along with her lover Henry Miller, began writing erotica for a private collector; however, by the 1970s, with the social changes occurring, she decided to allow them to be published, now the famous Delta of Venus and Little Birds.
“Dreams are necessary to life.”
“People living deeply have no fear of death.”
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
My mother had both these books in her dresser drawer when I was a kid. I would read them as a teenager whenever she left me home alone.
I recently found Delta of Venus at the Meuser Library book sale, and I bought it… Funny thing is, as a library board member I was helping with the event and this one woman asked me if we had some author… who was “like Nicholas Sparks” (gag me) and wrote “love stories without the intimate parts.” And I’m holding the Anais Nin book.
Really, what is a love story without those “intimate parts?” In romance, they are the happy ending. In other fiction, they allow us to see how much of a connection and what kind of connection the characters have.