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 heroin and her lonely death in her late sixties) and can be read into every line of her slim narratives. This is fine. But the extent to which this sort of writing has been identified as specifically female is something else again.
While Anna Kavan's work is an interesting example of a minor genre, it hardly makes sense to compare her, as Lawrence Durrell does on the book's dust jacket, to Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf. What separates writers such as Anaïs Nin and Anna Kavan from Barnes and Woolf is that in their exploration of subjective states they have only tunnel vision. Work so committed to subjectivity ends by being repetitive and inert. But in the hands of writers like Barnes, Woolf, or Proust, the subjective state still allows for peripheral vision so that the mind's interior is simply one more avenue for coming at the world and saying something new about it. Durrell, in his talk of the "subjective-feminist tradition," seems to forget that Woolf and Barnes are especially rich in wit (unlike Kavan or Nin, who never allow us a giggle) and that their wit arises from this interpenetration of interior and exterior worlds…. The total effect of [Kavan's] work is powerful, but for peculiar reasons: the reader is moved most by the sad fact that while the writer cared deeply about her art, she was at the same time in the grip of forces that prevented her from practicing it.
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