Anna Kavan
| Anna Kavan | |
|---|---|
| Born | Helen Emily Woods 10 April 1901 Cannes, France |
| Died | 5 December 1968 (aged 67) London, England |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, painter |
| Nationality | British |
| Notable works | Ice, Asylum Piece and other stories, Who Are You? |
| Spouse | Donald Ferguson (m.1919–1931), Stuart Edmonds (m.1931–1938) |
Anna Kavan (born Helen Emily Woods; 10 April 1901 – 5 December 1968) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter. Originally publishing under her first married name, Helen Ferguson, she adopted the name Anna Kavan in 1939, not only as a nom de plume but as her legal identity.
Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods in Cannes, South of France, the only child of a wealthy British family. Her parents travelled frequently and Kavan grew up in Europe and the United States. As an adult she remembered her childhood as lonely and neglected. Her father committed suicide in 1911. After his death, Kavan returned to the UK where she was a boarder at Parsons Mead School in Ashstead and Malvern College in Worcestershire.
Disregarding her daughter's desire to go to Oxford, her mother arranged an encounter with her former lover, Donald Ferguson. Helen Emily Woods married him in 1920, a few months before he took a position with the Railway Company in Burma. She moved with her husband, began to write and gave birth to her son Bryan. In 1923, Kavan left Ferguson and returned with her son to the UK. These biographical events match the underlying narrative of her initial Bildungsroman Let Me Alone (1930) while Who Are You? (1963), written in a Nouveau Roman style, is an experimental variation of her time in Burma.
Living alone in London during the mid-1920s, she began studying painting at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts, and continued to paint throughout her life. Kavan regularly travelled to the French Riviera where she was introduced to heroin by her tennis coach ‘to improve her serve’ and by racing car drivers she took up with. From then on, her syringe was to become her 'bazooka'.
In 1928 she divorced Ferguson and married an artist named Stuart Edmonds whom she had met near Toulon. They travelled together through France, Italy, Spain and the Pyrenees before resettling in England. A year later, she published her first novel, A Charmed Circle, under the name Helen Ferguson, followed by five more books over the next eight years.
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