It was Anais Nin, the French-Cuban author of erotic literature and short stories. She is regarded as one of the leading women writers of the 20th-century.
I suspect many readers will recognize her name as she is quite famous but not many recognized her face.
She is also famous for her published journals, which span more than sixty years, beginning when she was eleven years old and ending shortly before her death
Many of you picked up that she was a writer and had a creative/artistic temperament.
Here’s her story:
Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was born in 1903 in France and died in 1977 in the US.
Her parents were Cubans of French and Danish descent. Her father was a composer and pianist and her mother was a singer. Her father left the family when she was a child and as an adolescent she lived in NYC and Barcelona.
Here are some of the aspects those who commented picked up on:
Dancing
Anais Nin trained as a flamenco dancer in her twenties. (I am aware that the first photo I chose might have also given this away in the pose and the costume.) But the artistic temperament was certainly correct in any case.
Many Romantic Relationships
When she was 20 she married her first husband who was a banker and a film-maker and they lived in Paris. They were fairly wealthy.
Theirs was an ‘open marriage’ as she had affairs during her marriage which her husband tolerated. She had a passionate relationship with the American writer Henry Miller.
Anais Nin and Henry Miller
Then in 1936, Nin began an affair with the Peruvian bohemian Gonzalo Moré. In 1955 she married Rupert Pole and she lived with him in California until her death.
Deception
A few people picked up on this aspect of her life/situation – she was still married to Guiler when she married Rupert Pole.
Anais Nin and Rupert Pole
Apparently, her first husband Guiler who lived in NYC was unaware of her second marriage and life with Rupert Pole in California- he did not know about it until she died in 1977. Nin’s biographer Deirdre Bair alleges that Guiler knew, but consciously “chose not to know”.
This is what Wikipedia says about the set-up:
“Anaïs Nin would set up these elaborate facades in Los Angeles and in New York, but it became so complicated that she had to create something she called the lie box. She had this absolutely enormous purse and in the purse she had two sets of checkbooks. One said Anaïs Guiler for New York and another said Anaïs Pole for Los Angeles. She had prescription bottles from California doctors and New York doctors with the two different names. And she had a collection of file cards. And she said, “I tell so many lies I have to write them down and keep them in the lie box so I can keep them straight.
In 1966, Nin had her marriage with Pole annulled, due to the legal issues arising from both Guiler and Pole having to claim her as a dependent on their federal tax returns.”
Complicated Relationship with Father & Unhappiness
Many of you picked up on sadness and melancholy in the first picture. I think that this fits.
Firstly, her father left her mother when she was a child and she had an incestuous affair with her father, a disturbing fact which is not indicative of a healthy childhood or home life growing up.
She also had a love affair aged 28 which did not end well and as a result she became depressed and contemplated suicide.
She had highs and lows in her love affairs in general. Her affair with More was apparently very tumultuous. It is said that she was always looking for the ideal partner who could fulfill all her needs, but didn’t find him.
Children
She didn’t have any children. She had one pregnancy in the early 1930s but aborted the child.
Unconventionality
Obviously, Anais Nin was deeply unconventional in the bohemian way that she lived her life. She also challenged traditional gender roles:
“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
Here are some more famous quotations from her works:
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Other Character Traits
One of the things I like about doing this experiment around a writer, particularly a diarist, is that it is easy to know what sort of person you’re reading, and therefore we can objectively know what is an accurate impression in relation to her character.
From what I can gather from reading some of her work and from reading about her life, she was: intelligent, artistic, feminist (even if she might not call herself that as she distanced herself from political activism in the 1960’s), passionate, emotional (her work is full of feeling), unconventional, courageous and introspective.
Passion
“To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. Nothing else affects me. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometer! I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous— lava, inflammable, unrestrained.”
Courage
“What I like best about myself…is my audacity, my courage. The ways I have found to be true to myself without causing too much pain or damage… What I hate so much is my vanity, my need to shine, my need of applause and my sentimentality. I would like to be harder. I cannot make a joke, make fun of anyone, without feeling regrets.”
I wasn’t able to include comments on what everyone picked up, but if you want to read more about her to check on a specific event or trait that you picked up on, here are some articles about her:
How did you do?
Overall there were a lot of comments that I felt were ‘right on’ in their accuracy and most were going in the right direction. Well done all!
I hope you learned something from it and had fun doing it.
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Here’s my late read. I seem to only hit on very few things. 🙁
Well off
Actress/entertainer/singer/ dancer,etc
vision issues?
sad early yrs. used her past to help others.
died naturally….no foul play or trauma
seems like a sweet and trustworthy lady….mostly in later yrs. ….nice when young, but more trustworthy and giving in later yrs.
may have written books or plays in her later yrs.
canadian or american
very smart/well educated and refined
married for a pretty short amount of time. 5-10yrs. 2 marriages….2nd was shortest.
2 boys
died average age……70+
Hmmmmmm, seems I am more able to pick up information on men than on the women. Apart from the sadness in the younger photo I was off track with the rest of what I thought I read. Even though, I enjoy these experiments and look forward to more.
I have to laugh, because I got information that “she reminded me of Anais Nin” and then I listed all the traits I associated with her (creative, not afraid to break boundaries, very sexual, sensual, etc.). LOL
The one thing that threw me off is that I was getting that she was mentally unstable – like mentally ill – which I never believed Anais was. Perhaps some would perceive the way she lived her life that way…
Thanks for the great experiment. I love these.
Kara
Awww.. man! I trusted her.. and she’s a total liar. Guess I”m still gullible. :/
Yeah, I can see what you mean, Anna. It’s hard to articulate the feelings that come through, but loyalty was part if it. Just because you can trust someone to be loyal, doesn’t necessarily mean they are always truthful.
I’m happy that I picked up on french (or German) because that’s quite a specific bit of info to get. I thought she was an actress,and wrote that in the first comment I left, then soon after ammended it to say that I thought she was an actress in her social life. I am also glad that I knew not to trust her. She did have a softness to her and a kind heart (what woman can attract so many men without it?) and so her lies were not malicious, just selfish. I also picked up on her having an affair with a married man rather than being married and that she was single. If you look at her situation, she lived the life of a single woman, her marriages weren’t what I would think of as a marriage… so I think I was right on the money there… or as close as possible considering how quickly I picked up that info and how complicated her love life was. I also thought of her as childless but then also thought she had an illegitimate child. In the case of an abortion, both those things are true at once. Very happy with my reading. It wasn’t perfect but it was pretty close and I’ve never heard of this person.
I thought she was a cancerian zodiac sign… she was a pisces… so still a water sign based on emotions… I wonder if she had cancer prominently in her chart as her rising sign…
Hang on… so she was an actress in films. And Henry Miller was married, so she did have an affair with a married man. The only thing not explained so far is that I connected her with horses for some reason and also the name Brenda.
I think the bit where I picked up that she could see right through people makes sense as she was a psychoanalyst during her life.
Anna, I have done quite a few of your psychic experiments now and got some strong results. My only question is, what is this ability for? How can I use it in a healthy way? I find it hard to socialize because I pick up so much about the people around me that they often want to keep private and that I don’t need to know. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.
I can’t believe I hit alot of things right on the nose. Out of 20 guesses i have 12 of them right. I’m so excited that I recognized this ability. It has me looking at pictures trying to detect things.
I PICKED UP ON ALL THESE THINGS ABOUT HER. MOST OF MY STRONG FEELINGS WERE THE ONES I GOT RIGHT & JUST STATING THE FIRST THING THAT POPPED IN MY HEAD IS THE ONES I HAD WRONG, U REALLY NEED A CLEAR MIND WHEN CONCENTRATING SO THAT YOUR FOCUS DOESNT GET MANIPULATED.
HEIRESS
*ABUSED BY FATHER
*LONELY
COAL MINING
NURSE
*A MOTHER
*DEPRESSED
PHILATHROPIST
*NATURAL (BOHEMIAN)
*LONGING FOR HER MOTHER
LOVES COLOR
*WRITER
REPRESSED
*DANCER
*MARRIED TWICE
*CHOREOGRAPHER
BUSINESS WOMAN
LONGING FOR HER MOTHER
*MARRIED RICH
*NOVELIST
I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE NEXT EXPERIMENT. ANNA SAYCE YOU REALLY HELP OPEN UP MINDS.
Anna,
This was a fun one. For some reason I wasn’t able to add comments to the original post. Here are the things that I wrote down when you first posted her photos:
Younger years suffered depression, sad childhood, father left when she was young, very creative-perhaps a writer, sensitive, understanding, strong, found herself.
I always look forward to these. Thanks.
How funny, Kara. I’m glad you didn’t write who you got though, as it might have made a few people realize who it was!
G, I felt she was trustworthy too. I think she lied when it suited her bohemian need to have a double life unconstrained by social norms. But I don’t feel she was a compulsive liar or lied gratuitously. I also felt she was not the kind of liar who would purposely lie and hurt people.
Yayyy! After I posted my comment about how she looked so deceptive and untrustworthy, I went and read everyone else’s comments and almost everyone wrote about how innocent, open and trustworthy she looked, so I just said to myself, I guess I just can’t feel straight and threw this whole experiement away as a big failure–how great it is to know how right I was :). Especially after looking at her repeatedly and not being able to see the innocence others saw or anything but a phony facade in her face covering up her secrets.
And you know, I don’t have access to factual information on people, I only have access to their emotional state and information that is closer to the soul. Everyone else can get facts. I can only feel stuff. I don’t know why…
I can’t believe my comment on the previous blog post is gone. Now I can’t even see what I wrote about her…
Hi Lucia,
Not sure what happened there. All comments were enabled.
Hi Heather, Glad you enjoyed it, you had quite a few hits.
Hi Stephanie, glad you gained some insight on your intuitive process and how it works! Well done.
Hi GGo,
Well done on your results.
The best way to use this ability is to assess someone of importance to you, who you don’t know well enough yet. A potential love partner, a new babysitter, employee, etc.