Who was Anna Kavan

A. A good question about someone who wrote a novel entitled Who Are You She has been variously described as 'De Quincey's heir' and 'Kafka's sister' and is one of the most bizarre figures in English literature in the 20th century. Born to a comfortably off family in 1901 or thereabouts - she was, at best, evasive about the facts of her life - and given the name Helen Woods, she had a peripatetic childhood. Her life was haunted by her glamorous mother while her father remains an indistinct figure.

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Married and divorced twice, she suffered the first of a number of nervous breakdowns after the collapse of her second marriage. In the wake of this she ended up in a sanatorium only to emerge, as if from a cocoon, with an outwardly different personality, bleached blonde hair, a new name - Anna Kavan, the name of a character in one of her early novels - and a radically altered literary style.

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She destroyed almost all of her personal correspondence and her diaries, so details about her life are hard to come by. She had become addicted to heroin in the 1920s and remained so until her death from natural causes in 1968. When the police found her body they reported that they found gruesome paintings featuring executions and people being hanged by their entrails, as well as 'enough heroin to kill the whole street'.

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Q. What did she write
A. She started to write while living with her first husband in Burma in the 1920s. Her early works, under her first married name of Helen Ferguson, were somewhat eccentric 'Home Counties' novels. After her metamorphosis her novels and short stories increasingly featured the themes of drug use, hallucination, mental illness and her characters' lack of connection with their physical surroundings. Her books have been described as using 'night-time language', the language of dreams and drugs, where such states of being have more substance that the waking world. Not cheery stuff, but written with a clinical dispassion that is unique. Her best-known (it's a relative thing) novel is Ice, but others worth seeking out include Asylum Piece, The Parson, Sleep Has His House, Mercury, Who Are You and Let Me Alone.

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Q. What do they say about her
A.

• 'Don't wait for the Merchant-Ivory adaptations.' - Time Out
• 'Few contemporary novelists could match the fierce intensity of her vision.' - J.G. Ballard
• 'Anna Kavan is at present that uncomfortable thing . . . a cult figure. Her situation is as ambiguous as she could desire.' - Brian Aldiss

Q. What did she say about herself
A. 'I want to be one of the world's best-kept secrets.' She's got her way so far.

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By Simon Smith