Ladders to Fire

This new authoritative edition of Ladders to Fire, Anais Nin’s first full-length novel, includes character descriptions, a publishing history, an author’s chronology, and the original prologue written by Anais Nin herself in 1946. The principal character, Lillian, a restless spirit who is trapped in a conventional marriage, “travers[ses] a street… She was not attacked, raped, or mutilated. She was not kidnapped for white slavery. But as she crossed the street…she felt as if all these horrors had happened to her, she felt the nameless anguish, the shrinking of the heart, the asphyxiation of pain, the horror of torture whose cries no one hears.” What makes Ladders to Fire revolutionary is that it was an early attempt to address woman’s quest for completeness in a male-dominated world. Through the relationships of the iconic characters Lillian, Djuna, Sabina and Jay, Nin examines “the destruction in woman…woman’s struggle to understand her own nature,” a theme still relevant today. Ladders to Fire is the first novel in the series Nin entitled Cities of the Interior. The other titles are Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.