Biography

Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods in Cannes on 10 April 1901. An only child, her parents travelled frequently and as an adult she remembered her childhood as lonely and neglected, her father killed himself when she was ten years old. In 1920 she married Donald Ferguson and lived with him in Burma, they had a son Bryan. Helen Ferguson left her marriage in 1925 and returned to the UK, divorcing two years later. In the mid-1920s she attended the London Central School of Arts and Crafts and she continued to paint for pleasure throughout her life, exhibiting rarely (the image on these webpages is taken from one of her self-portraits). The first evidence of Kavan’s heroin addiction which would continue intermittently until her death dates from around this time. In 1928 she married Stuart Edmonds, an artist, and during the time of this marriage she published six novels under the name Helen Ferguson. Late in 1935 she gave birth to a baby girl who died soon afterwards, she and her husband quickly adopted another baby. This second marriage broke down in 1938 and in this year Kavan was treated at a sanatorium in Switzerland, she would continue to suffer from bouts of severe depression for many years and her life was blighted by suicide attempts and periods of hospitalization and asylum incarceration.

In 1940 Helen Edmonds published a collection of stories Asylum Piece under the name Anna Kavan, the name of one of her own fictional characters, and her writing style was radically altered. She went on to adopt this name in her personal life. During the early years of the Second World War she travelled extensively, living for a time in the US and later in New Zealand with her lover, the writer Ian Hamilton. Returning to England late in 1942 she worked for a short time with soldiers suffering from war neurosis at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital and studied for the Diploma in Psychological Medicine. She went on to work as a secretary at the literary journal Horizon, contributing stories, articles and reviews. In the final years of the war Kavan’s divorce from Edmonds was finalized and her son Bryan was killed. During these years she first began to be treated by Dr Karl Theodore Bluth, the psychiatrist with whom she also maintained a close friendship until his death in 1964. She continued to undergo sporadic inpatient treatment for her drug addiction and psychological difficulties, including visits to the clinic of Swiss existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger. In her later years Kavan lived as a virtual recluse in London and suffered from poor health, enjoying a late triumph with her final and best-known novel Ice in 1967. She died of heart failure on 4 Dec 1968 and was cremated at Golder’s Green crematorium.