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Ladders to Fire chronicles the erotic attachments
of four young women and a lascivious playboy artist at the
centre of their circle.
For Lillian, who crashes through a serious of passionate male
and female sexual relationships and one marriage, every new
encounter is an invitation to emotional suicide. The obsessions
of Djuna alchemize into an undiscriminating protective love
with potential to transform ecstasy into catastrophe. Helen,
driven by her fears and jealousies, will dramatize the smallest
incident while Sabina is truly treacherous — ‘the
first time one looked at her one felt: everything will burn.’
Set in the pre-war, expatriate Paris of Henry Miller, this
novel — which shocked Nin’s contemporaries —
draws its inspiration from her confessional diaries.
‘Vivacious writing . . . truly perceptive’ —
Daily Mail
‘Anaïs Nin savours language itself, moulding it
into a seductive psychodrama . . . It is refreshing to find
a 1940s novel so firmly situated in the realms of female consciousness
and so rooted in a conviction of the validity of female desire’
— Scotsman
‘Anaïs Nin writes with absolute originality, reaching
down into profound levels of half-consciousness to make discoveries
which are revealing and almost alarming in their violence’
— Birmingham Post
‘Anaïs Nin writes sensitively, with psychological
training as well as insight . . . she has a subcutaneous interest
in her characters and [D.H.] Lawrence’s sixth sense’
— Times Literary Supplement
ANAÏS NIN was born in Paris in 1903. Her first book was
published in the 1930s, and she went on to write stories and
a series of autobiographical novels, as well as her celebrated
volumes of erotica. Perhaps best known for her Journals,
her personal life and loves have attracted considerable attention
— partly through her association with Henry Miller and
his wife but also because for a number of years she was married
to two men at the same time, with neither finding out until
after her death in 1977. |
