Helen Woods Ferguson Edmonds, who wrote her best-known work under the pseudonym Anna Kavan, is one of the most enigmatic of modern British writers. Her haunted life is reflected in her work, which is permeated with powerful language and surreal imagery...

Anna Kavan's writing is inextricably tied up with the convolutions of her tragic life. Of course this is, to a greater or lesser extent, true of all writers…. Yet with Anna Kavan the stories and novels are so subjective in tone that it is as if she wishes, in reality, to write her own spiritual autobiography but, rather than do this, has dressed up her sufferings and longings in fictional terms. Often the short stories are little more than fragments illustrating individual paranoia or intense ...

Anna Kavan, like Anaïs Nin with whom she is often compared, is a cult writer. Her work is treasured by people who enjoy its sensitive probing of inner states and who do not require much in the way of narrative technique, imagination, or linguistic richness. The rawness of her personal experience in its rawest unworked state is apparently enough to satisfy. Like many cult figures, her life story is well known (nearly every one of her books contains an Introduction describing her lifelong addiction to ...

On coming to what [Eagle's Nest] is about—plotwise—one has no option but to rely on the narrator himself, a distracted soul who never knows exactly what is going on either. For him the screen between real and imaginary actions was attacked by woodworm some good while before the novel began. The narrator is first encountered behind a desk making Christmas angels out of papier mâché, loathing each one of them, and behind schedule to boot. From a successful career in business...