I found Anna Kavan and now I can only read books written by women

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 Kindred, Ursula K Le Guin’s prophetic, gender-fluid novel The Left Hand Of Darkness, Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs Of A Spacewoman and the work of Rachel Ingalls. Her weird, kinky, 1982 novella Mrs Caliban bears an extraordinary resemblance to Guillermo del Toro’s film The Shape Of Water. Just saying.

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I also read short stories by Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Penelope Lively, Murial Spark, Patricia Highsmith and Elizabeth Howard (her ‘Three Miles Up’ is a classic of weird fiction). This year I’m reading Agatha Christie novels as palate cleansers between other books, though the big find has been Jean Rhys, another rackety and reclusive genius, and author of Wide Sargasso Sea. It re-frames Jane Eyre through the eyes of Mrs Rochester, though that description doesn’t come close to capturing its vivid magic.

I don’t read only women, but it is predominantly women. Why? Hard to say. Perhaps it’s because the novels are often short, which is a story in its own right (the pram in the hallway and all that). Perhaps it’s because the people behind the pen are so fascinating. Perhaps it’s the appeal of subverting the canon and finding the authors who were overlooked because of their gender. But mostly, I think, it’s because the writing is jaw droppingly good. Here’s Duras, in her most famous novel The Lover: “I’ve never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.” Fabulous, no?

In a thoughtful and enlightening article for The Herald, author Mairi Kidd picks up on some of those ideas. She also casts her practised eye over Scottish female writers past and present, discusses the forces which have kept so many women out of the public gaze – and celebrates those who are re-appraising (and, importantly, re-issuing) work by authors such as Shepherd and Mitchison. You can read the piece here.

Cash registers

With constant uncertainty over funding streams, it has been a fraught year so far for Scotland’s artists and creatives. Now comes the news that decisions about Creative Scotland’s Multi-Year Funding programme have been delayed until next year. The organisations and venues which have applied for the funding – and who very much rely on it – should have found out if they were successful by the end of this month. But in a statement issued last week, Creative Scotland chair Robert Wilson announced that the time frame had slipped as a result of a lack of “budget clarity” from the Scottish Government. So now those same organisations and venues are in limbo.

A statement from Dundee Contemporary Arts summed up the feelings of many of them. “The impact of this announcement, and the ongoing lack of clarity about the level of additional funding available to organisations through this fund, means that we face an extremely uncertain future… This delay will affect our audit report and our ability to be declared a going concern.”

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Musselburgh’s Brunton Theatre is one of many venues which is already struggling. It has launched a fund-raising campaign and is warning of potential closure. Edinburgh’s Summerhall venue hasn’t had its troubles to seek over the last few months, but it has just been issued with a winding up order on top of everything else. And, while nobody’s laying this one at John Swinney’s door (yet), Cineworld’s Glasgow Parkhead multiplex has closed, one of five UK cinemas being mothballed by the company.

Here you can read more about the cuts, the delays and the responses to both.

And finally

The Herald’s critics have been busy over the past week. Neil Cooper visited Cumbernauld Theatre for a revival of David Greig’s play The Events, about the aftermath of a school shooting, and he checked out Ramesh Meyyappan’s Love Beyond at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre. At the same venue he also took in Annie Lowry Thomas’s solo show After Party, a sort of state-of-the nation address merged with personal reflections on life in the 21st century UK – and delivered mostly from a sofa. “Frank and disarmingly funny,” is his verdict.

Annie Lowry Thomas in After Party (Image: Jassy Earl) Elsewhere music critic Keith Bruce has been running an eye over (and cocking a well attuned ear to) the national orchestras. First up, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the baton of Thomas Sondergard for a performance of Mahler at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Second, an evening of Mozart with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at City Halls.

Finally, book reviewer Alastair Mabbott gives his verdict on new novels by Edinburgh-based American Angie Spotto, and Glasgow-based Francophone Graeme Macrae Burnet. Following last year’s Gothic debut The Grief Nurse, Spotto has just published folk fantasy Bone Diver. Macrae Burnet, Booker Prize shortlisted for His Bloody Project, has given us A Case Of Matricide, the final instalment in his Georges Gorski trilogy of crime novels set in the town of Saint-Louis on the French-Swiss border.

And here you can read my interview with Macrae Burnet.