Ladders to Fire explores the erotic attachments of four young women. Nin described it as a "woman's struggle to understand her own nature." It began a five-volume "continuous novel, " Cities of the Interior, which includes Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Solar Barque (1959). Set in the pre-war, expatriate Paris of Henry Miller, this novel -- which shocked Nin's contemporaries -- draws its inspiration from her confessional diaries. This 1995 reissue of of the 1946 novel Ladders to Fire has a new cover and foreword.