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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 akin to the fantastic fiction of writers such as Franz Kafka and J. G. Ballard. Her fictions are filled with dream-like, if not nightmarish, visions of warped realities and distorted imaginings. Such intensity may be part of the reason why for many years Kavan was not widely read at all, let alone as part of the tradition of British fantastic literature. Yet, as Brian W. Aldiss and other critics have pointed out, much of her work is fantastic in nature, and her novel Ice (1967) is one of the most distinctive works of science fiction since World War II. Moreover, her preoccupation with depicting psychological dramas through bizarre imagery foreshadows a similar concern with "inner space" in New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s.
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