Oftentimes, an author's oeuvre begs to be read in chronological order; in this way, readers can trace the development of this particular author's style, voice, their major themes, their departures from normative form—James, Joyce, Forster, and Woolf come to mind, all figures with whom Kavan is in dialogue—and how their "minor" works of the younger years can be dissected in various ways as formative experiments necessarily to pave the way for the "major" works of the later years.

But Anna Kavan's work is different. Most famous for Ice, her last completed novel, Kavan has a reputation in her fiction for deeply focused psychological portraits that prove the precarious boundary line between reality and fantasy, waking life and dreams, hopes and hallucinations—and her prose style is just as precarious as her thematic concerns. In Ice, Sleep Has His House, and Asylum Piece—currently, the only other Kavan I've read; all links to my reviews here on Goodreads—Kavan's prose is eerie, icy, stark, cunning, malicious, and also extremely fragile.

And yet this is not the case with Let Me Alone, one of Kavan's earlier novels written under her given name, Helen Woods. While there are several novels from this early period—a period prior to Kavan's hospitalization from suicide attempts and a heroin addiction that remarkably had little negative impact, according to her friend and executor Rhys Davies, until the last year of her life, during the writing of IceKavan is more rightfully known for her surreal work from the 1940s onward. However, Let Me Alone, her second novel written in 1930, is perhaps critical to understanding why Kavan changed. And here I don't mean only her style, but also her persona, for Kavan did, after all, change her name after the protagonist in Let Me Alone, signaling an appellative marker: not only am "I" not "Helen Woods," but "I" am also not "Anna Kavan," for she is a fictional creation. Additionally, this flags Let Me Alone as a text with which Kavan continued to identify later in life, after changing her name and her style; as such, the text is imperative reading for any fan of Kavan's work.

But take this with the caveat I noted above: Kavan's work is best worked through back to front. Like a psychotropic butterfly, the Kavan we know—and the Kavan whom many surrealists, from Nin onward, so admired—seems to have emerged from nowhere. The voices in Ice, Sleep Has His House, and the short pieces collected in Asylum Piece (which may also be read as a kind of novel) are at odd variance with the narrative voice in Let Me Alone, and yet Kavan points to this novel, stating, in effect, "I am Anna Kavan,Madame Bovary, c'est moi." (This Flaubert aside works here, too: Kavan is channeling many Ur-texts while trying to find her own style, Madame Bovary being one, fused with a sort of Lawrencian sensibility that invokes the schematic of Lady Chatterley's Lover but is more rooted stylistically in his works with heavy-handed symbolism like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.)

Let Me Alone registers, however, only for those acquainted with the literature of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods; like James and Woolf, to name two authors to whom I referred above, Kavan-as-Woods is writing a class satire in which the convention of the bildungsroman is used to consider gender and its sociocultural constraints on one woman's life, a woman named Anna-Marie Forrester whose marriage rechristens her with a new nom du père: Kavan. At times, I was reminded of Woolf's early work, particularly The Voyage Out and Night and Day; like Woolf, Kavan-as-Woods is still working within normative forms in order to find her own footing and her own voice. And, also like Woolf, Kavan's concerns are at odds with the heteronormative worlds of fiction, and the deviations from conventions—while minimal to one not steeped in the period and its nuances—are considerable and even somewhat scandalous.

With that said, Let Me Alone is somehow rightfully famous only as a quiet and almost inconsequential formative text, a "minor" work that would pave the way for Kavan's "major" work written on the brink of and throughout the Second World War. In the same vein, it is a novel that would have been buried entirely has not Kavan emerged from her chrysalis with the power, violence, and intimacy of her later work, rendering this early novel of import if only for her continued identification with its queer, at times cliched, but oh-so-teeming protagonist: the one and only Anna Kavan. ( )