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Letters and Diaries

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Nearer the Moon: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin 1937-1939

Anais Nin's diaries revealed her private self, her doubts and weaknesss and the uncensored details about her relationships. This fourth volume of A Journal of Love follows Henry and June, Incest and Fire to cover the years 1937-39. It continues the story of what Nin called her 'dismemberment by love.' She remains torn between three men: Henry Miller, whose detached self-immersion and artistic amorality both attract and repel her; Gonzalo More, a sensitive and attentive but jealous lover who drives her to distraction; and Hugh Guiler, her faithful husband. The theme of these diaries is maturity: Nin has acquired the wisdom to see through Henry and Gonzalo, while her relationship with her husband is clarified. She cannot love him physically but she needs him as an anchor. Nearer the Moon is also the volume in which Nin settles with her father, Joaquin Nin. The diary ends with Nin's departure from France as war looms. She has no idea that she will never live in France again and that this is the last diary to be written there.

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Journal of a Novel: The "East of Eden" Letters (Penguin Modern Classics)

This collection of letters forms a fascinating day-by-day account of Steinbeck's writing of EAST OF EDEN, his longest and most ambitious novel. The letters, ranging over many subjects - textual discussion, trial flights of workmanship, family matters - provide an illuminating perspective on Steinbeck, the creative genius, and a private glimpse of Steinbeck, the man.

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Letters of Ted Hughes

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to other lives (including a readership comprising both adults and children): a life pared down to essentials and yet eventful, peripatetic, at times publicly controversial.

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Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters

The never-before published letters of the legendary Mitford sisters, alive with wit, affection, tragedy and gossip: a charismatic history of the century's signal events played out in the lives of a controversial and uniquely gifted family. Spanning the twentieth century, these magically vivid letters between the legendary Mitford sisters constitute not just a superb social and historical chronicle (what other family counted among its friends Hitler and the Queen, Cecil Beaton and President Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh and Givenchy?); they also give an intimate portrait of the stormy but enduring relationship between six beautiful and gifted women who emerged from the same stock, incarnated the same indomitable spirit, yet carved out starkly different roles and identities for themselves. Nancy, the scalding wit who transferred her family life into bestselling novels; Pamela, who craved nothing more than a quiet country life; Diana, the fascist jailed with her husband, Oswald Mosley, during WWII; Unity, an attempted suicide, obsessed with Hitler; Jessica, the runaway communist and fighter for social change; and Deborah, the genial socialite who found herself Duchess of Devonshire. Writing to one another to confide, commiserate, tease, rage and gossip, the sisters wrote above all to amuse. A correspondence of this scope is rare, for it to be penned by six such born storytellers makes it unique. Editor Charlotte Mosley -- Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law -- has had unrestricted access to the vast archive of family letters and photographs, most of which have never been published before.

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A Woman in Berlin: Diary 20 April 1945 to 22 June 1945

Between April 20th and June 22nd of 1945 the anonymous author of A Woman in Berlin wrote about life within the falling city as it was sacked by the Russian Army. Fending off the boredom and deprivation of hiding, the author records her experiences, observations and meditations in this stark and vivid diary. Accounts of the bombing, the rapes, the rationing of food and the overwhelming terror of death are rendered in the dispassionate, though determinedly optimistic prose of a woman fighting for survival amidst the horror and inhumanity of war. This diary was first published in America in 1954 in an English translation and in Britain in 1955. A German language edition was published five years later in Geneva and was met with tremendous controversy. In 2003, over forty years later, it was republished in Germany to critical acclaim - and more controversy. This diary has been unavailable since the 1960s and is now newly translated into English. A Woman in Berlin is an astonishing and deeply affecting account.

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Selected Letters

The finest and most enjoyable of Virginia Woolf's letters are brought together in a single volume. It is a marvelous collection - spontaneous, witty, often flirtatious and powerfully moving. Whether bemoaning some domestic travail, commenting publicly on the state of the nation, or discussing cultural, artistic or personal concerns, Virginia Woolf is one of the great correspondents. This volume displays not only Woolf's courage and brilliance, her generosity and love of gossip, but also her genius for close and enduring friendship.

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Selected Diaries

Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide her thoughts on public events or the joys and trials of domestic life. Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded her thoughts with unfailing grace, courage, honesty and wit. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language.

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The Journals of John Fowles: v. 2

The first volume of John Fowles's "Journals" ended with him achieving international literary renown after the publication of "The Collector and The Magus", and leaving London behind to live in a remote house on the Dorset coast near Lyme Regis. This final volume charts the rewards and struggles of his continuing literary career, but at the same time reveals the often reluctant celebrity behind the outward success. Enjoying a reputation as one of the world's leading novelists, Fowles wins enormous wealth, kudos and attention, has the satisfaction of seeing "The French Lieutenant's Woman" turned into a highly acclaimed Hollywood film, but none the less comes to regard his fame with deep ambivalence. It cannot repair the growing strains between himself and his wife Elizabeth, who does not share his taste for rural isolation, nor can it cure the disenchantment he feels for an increasingly materialist society. While the challenges of the passing years - whether illness, depression or personal bereavement - underline the vanity of worldly ambition, he finds refuge and solace in his study of the animals, plants, birds and insects of the surrounding countryside. This concluding volume of the "Journals" contains an eloquent expression of this profound attachment to the natural world, but also marks a writer's continuing quest for wisdom and self-understanding. Unflinchingly honest, it provides an invaluable insight into the creative background of his novels, as well as the writer's inner life and preoccupations.

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The Journals of John Fowles: v.1: Vol 1

A major literary landmark: the first volume of one of the most extraordinary journals of our time In 1963 John Fowles won international recognition with his first published novel The Collector. But his roots as a serious writer can be traced back long before to the journal he began as a student at Oxford in the late 1940s and continued to keep faithfully over the next half century. Written with an unsparing honesty and forthrightness, it reveals the inner thoughts and creative development of one of the twentieth century's most innovative and important novelists. Commencing with his final year at Oxford, this first volume chronicles the year he then spent lecturing at a university in France; his experiences as a young school teacher on the Greek island of Spetsai, which would inspire his second novel The Magus; his love affair there with the married woman who would later become his wife; his return to England and the long struggle to achieve literary success. It reveals not only his devotion to Greek and French culture, but also the huge part that a life-long passion for natural history has played in his life and writing. This first-hand account of the road to fame and fortune holds the reader's attention with all the narrative power of the novels, but also offers an invaluable insight into the intimate relationship between Fowles's own life and his fiction.

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Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-1964

'I intend to do everything ...I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly ...everything matters!' So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen, in the early pages of this selection from her private diaries written in her youth and early adulthood. "Reborn" is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America's greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag's voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag's complex self-awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself - all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday life.

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John Cheever: The Journals

The American writer, John Cheever, died in 1982, leaving behind 29 loose-leaf notebooks begun in the late Forties. They form the content of this book. His commitment to them was of central importance to his life - as a workbook and a retreat, an unhindered act of self-revelation where he could explore his ambiguities. He loved his wife and their children, but was acutely lonely; he loved women, but he also loved men; he hated himself for his drinking, but for much of his life was dependent upon it; he was a great writer, but one whose acute levels of perception often crippled him as a person.