Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan was a British writer and artist.

Helen Woods was born in France to British subjects. She was the only child of well-off but emotionally cold parents. Helen was raised by a nanny and spoke to her mother for no more than ten minutes a day. She spent her childhood and youth in Europe and the United States, and lived briefly in Burma after her marriage. She was married twice, and both marriages ended in divorce. Her only son, Brian, died during the Second World War. Her daughter Margaret, born in her marriage to Stuart Edmonds, died shortly after birth. The couple later adopted a girl whom they named Susanna.

The writer's first six works were published under the name Helen Fergusson, her real surname, acquired in her first marriage. Later, however, she adopted a pseudonym taken from the heroine of her own 1930 book, Let Me Alone. The short-story collection Asylum Piece and all subsequent works were published under the name Anna Kavan.

For most of her adult life, Kavan suffered from heroin addiction. She never hid her addiction. According to one version, a heroin overdose was the cause of the writer's death. This view was also held by her literary colleague Doris Lessing. However, the officially recognized cause is heart failure. It is known that Anna Kavan made several suicide attempts, in particular after her son's death.

Anna Kavan's prose is often described as experimental, avant-garde, visionary, strange, and written in the spirit of Franz Kafka. Many of her works were published after Anna herself had been admitted to a psychiatric clinic, where she was treated for a nervous breakdown brought on by drug addiction and a suicide attempt. After leaving the clinic, she officially changed her name to Anna Kavan. All the works created in the later period of her career are marked by a special psychological depth; linguists speak of the "nocturnal language" she created, a distinctive lexicon of dreams, obsessions, and mental instability. She is often compared to Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and Anaïs Nin. Kavan also had experience writing in collaboration. Thus, the novel The Horse's Tale was published in 1949, with psychoanalyst and writer's friend Karl Theodor Bluth as