This week is the fortieth anniversary of Anna Kavan’s death. Although these days she remains largely unmentioned by the mainstream media, without her the modern literary landscape that we know and love would be much more barren. Canonised female authors from Anais Nin to Virginia Woolf owe much of their experimental style and strength of voice to Anna Kavan.
Since her death, however, there has been a substantial revival of interest in her writing from literary essayists. Her best-known work, Sleep Has His House, is a predominantly autobiographical account of Anna’s childhood. Reminiscent in places of T. S. Eliot and Getrude Stein, it combines memoir with a brave and fluid use of evocative, innovative language.
From her chosen pseudonym to the extent that the content of her fiction was cannibalized from real-life experience, the legacy left behind by Anna Kavan is enigmatic, to say the least. Biographer Jeremy Reed, who wrote A Stranger on Earth about Anna, had an epic and complicated task reconciling the various contradicting accounts of her birth and upbringing. Matters weren’t helped much by the fact that she destroyed most of her diaries and personal letters prior to her death, and was fond of giving friends and acquaintances false details of her past.
Although her first six books were written under the name of Helen Ferguson, her name during her first marriage, she is better known for the fiction published after her reinvention as Anna Kavan; an alias taken from a character in her novel Let Me Alone. With a plethora of works published between 1929 and her death in 1968, with further writings released posthumously, Anna was nothing if not prolific.
But behind the seemingly inexhaustible supply of originality, the recurring themes of Anna’s fiction are often permeated by her long-term heroin addiction, mental illness and suicide attempts. Although a tragic figure in many ways, forty years after her death Anna Kavan’s work remains relevant and an integral part of post-modern feminist literature. Investigate Sleep Has His House or any other of her books you can get your mitts on, and you’ll understand what I mean…