NIN, Anaïs.

£3,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The House of Incest. First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Rebecca and Henry, with affection, Anaïs, Paris 1936". This edition comprised 249 copies, all numbered and signed by the author: this is number 67. It was Nin's "first, best, and most challenging volume of prose fiction" (Franklin and Schneider). The recipient was Nin's friend Rebecca West, the author and critic hailed as "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" by Time in 1947, and her husband, the banker Henry Maxwell Andrews. West's literary opinions were strongly held and sharply worded. She called Tolstoy the "most bogus great writer of all time", declared "I am dead to Dante", and dismissed H. G. Wells (the father of her child) as "the old maid among novelists" (Rollyson, p. 10) Her friend and colleague at the Evening Standard once told her that she had the reputation of a "hell-cat with a tongue made of broken bottles and dipped in acid" (ibid.) Nin's diaries often refer to West, including a recollection of their first encounter. West had written to Nin praising her first published work, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932) and invited her to visit London. Nin accepted, and an intense friendship blossomed. "I liked her immediately", recalled Nin, "her warmth, her brilliant dark eyes, her wit. She visited me in Louveciennes. We talked so much together we lost our way in the forest and had to telephone to a friend to come and

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