In life, Kavan came across as distant and ethereal-a temperamental leaning intensified by daily drug use-but she was surprisingly attuned to the dynamics of literary reputation.
It was in this new guise-born-again avant-gardist-and under this new name that she became known to the Home Office (as a registered heroin addict) to her most important publisher, Peter Owen and to a small but avid readership. The name was borrowed from the protagonist of her most autobiographical novels, “Let Me Alone” (1930) and “ A Stranger Still” (1935), and chosen, at least in part, because it echoed the name of the writer who inspired the shifts in literary approach that accompanied her change of identity: Franz Kafka. Not long after being discharged from a Swiss sanitarium, in 1938, the English writer Helen Edmonds, who was born Helen Woods and had published six novels as Helen Ferguson, replaced her long brown locks with a neat blond bob and started calling herself Anna Kavan.
0 kommentar(er)
