This article appears as part of the Herald Arts newsletter.

I tend only to read novels by women these days, a trend which started a few years ago when I encountered, in close succession, the short stories of Anaïs Nin, the work of Shirley Jackson and an author called Anna Kavan, whose best known work is 1967 novel Ice. It defies genre description, but if you had to pick one it would be sci-fi.

Kavan was some woman. She was born Helen Woods in Cannes in 1901. Her wealthy father died by suicide and she was still in her teens when she took up with her mother’s lover, whom she later married. So it was as Helen Ferguson that she was first published. She spent her 20s hanging out with racing drivers in the south of France, which is how she began a lifelong addiction to heroin, and then trained to be a painter.

She divorced, married again, attempted suicide and was sectioned, an experience she details in linked short story collection Asylum Piece. By then she was writing as Anna Kavan, actually a character in one of her own novels. She was a rackety, reclusive genius and it’s no surprise Jeremy Reed’s 2006 biography is titled A Stranger On Earth. For a long time it was only left-field independent Peter Owen Publishers who kept her work alive, though in the past decade she has been installed in the Penguin Classics pantheon, which is where I found her. Check her out.

After Nin and Kavan I ploughed through the work of fellow travellers such as Marguerite Duras and Jane Bowles (her 1943 novel Two Series Ladies is one of film director John Waters’s all-time favourites, so I thank him for the recommendation). I also read Nan Shepherd and Josephine Tey. Then I slipped back into sci-fi with Octavia E Butler’s........

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