Authors: Anna Kavan

Last reviewed: June 2018

English novelist and short-story writer.

Born Helen Emily Woods, the only child of a well-to-do English family, in 1901, Anna Kavan spent most of her childhood and adolescence unhappily living in various boarding schools. Some scholars believe that she inherited a lifelong tendency to depression from her father, who committed suicide in 1911, when Kavan was ten years old. Despite her misfortunes, she did well at school and had the opportunity to attend Oxford University, but she declined because of her mother’s opposition.

In 1920 Kavan married Donald Ferguson, though she did not love him, and went with him to Burma, where he worked as an engineer. Two years later, after giving birth to a son, Bryan, she returned to England, effectively escaping from a miserable relationship that later ended in divorce. Regularly depressed, she began to use heroin, to which she would be addicted for the rest of her life. In 1926, she fell madly in love with a wealthy painter named Stuart Edmonds, and the two were married two years later.

Kavan published her first novel, A Charmed Circle (1929), under her first married name, Helen Ferguson. She would publish five more books under that name, the most noteworthy of which was Let Me Alone (1930), a thinly fictionalized account of her life in Burma. In 1935 she gave birth to a daughter, Margaret, who died as an infant; soon after, she and Edmonds adopted a daughter named Susanna.

Despite Kavan's early achievements as a writer, the 1930s proved to be a difficult period in her life. Her second marriage disintegrated in 1938, and her last novel as Helen Ferguson, Rich Get Rich (1937), was a failure. She attempted suicide several times, tried unsuccessfully to break her heroin addiction, and was twice institutionalized because of mental breakdowns. During this time, however, she also became acquainted with the works of Franz Kafka, which would later have a fruitful impact on her fiction. She then decided to transform herself into a new person, changing her hair color from auburn to blonde and adopting the name Anna Kavan, after her protagonist in Let Me Alone.

In the early 1940s, Kavan traveled to California with writer and conscientious objector Ian Hamilton and later stayed with him in New Zealand; her adventures during this time are fictionally recounted in her posthumously published novella My Soul in China (1975). The first book she published under her new name was Asylum Piece, and Other Stories (1940), a series of brilliant sketches, some linked by the character of a tormented young woman and the setting of a mental institution. It was very well received, as was a second anthology along similar lines, I Am Lazarus (1945). After returning to England Kavan worked and wrote for the avant-garde magazine Horizon. Even during this period of new success, however, misfortune struck: her son was killed in 1944 while serving with the Royal Air Force.

After World War II Kavan's career again seemed in decline, though she published another interesting novel, The House of Sleep (1947; published in Great Britain as Sleep Has His House, 1948). Less than a decade later, she had to partially finance the publication of A Scarcity of Love (1956) herself. She had also ceased traveling and became a recluse of sorts. In 1957 she met a supportive publisher, Peter Owen, who would publish almost all of her later works. She began to rebuild her reputation with two fine works, Eagles’ Nest (1957) and A Bright Green Field (1958), and attracted further attention with an extraordinary short novel, Who Are You? (1963). Like Let Me Alone, Who Are You? fictionalizes her experiences in Burma, although in more dark and surrealistic tones. She also wrote a number of evocative stories, published posthumously in the collection Julia and the Bazooka (1970).

Kavan's true triumph came when she took a draft of a novel about a man obsessively pursuing a mysterious woman (the original version was eventually published as Mercury in 1994) and recast it in the new framework of a future world careening toward war and chaos as a global cooling brings massive glaciers threatening to cover and freeze the entire planet. The resulting novel, Ice (1967), won universal acclaim; writer and critic Brian W. Aldiss called it the year's best science-fiction novel, and it was accepted for mass-market publication in the United States. Unfortunately, not long after, in December 1968, Anna Kavan died suddenly of heart failure induced her lifelong addiction to heroin.

After Kavan's death, a number of her earlier books were republished, attracting considerable critical attention. Several short-story collections and three novels—Mercury, The Parson (1995), and Guilty (2007)—were also published posthumously.