The Antarctic’s proximity had a powerful subconscious effect on her. Biographers suppose that Kavan had the idea for Ice when she was living in New Zealand during the early years of the Second World War. The precise nature of the apocalypse at its centre is never stated, but it seems that the Antarctic ice cap has fragmented, increasing its bulk to the extent that the albedo effect has cooled the planet and triggered an ice age. In 1967 she published the novel that was belatedly to make her name. She was also a talented artist, and Reed had to rely upon her paintings in part to reconstruct her life’s narrative. She systematically destroyed her diaries, letters and other personal correspondence, Reed recounts. ‘She did everything she could to resist biography,’ her biographer Jeremy Reed writes in A Stranger on Earth, the life and work of Anna Kavan. Anna Kavan (as she became) was a blonde, emotionally distant writer who became best known after her death in 1968 for being a near-lifelong heroin addict. Born Helen Woods to wealthy, indolent and emotionally cold parents, in her late thirties – after a life of improbable travels for a woman of her era – she reinvented herself several times, finally taking the name of one of her own characters.

One of only a few great British modernist writers and author of some 19 books in her lifetime, Kavan shares an era and a clipped, visionary style with TS Eliot, but never became as well known. And a recent paean to this same novel appeared in the Guardian. My colleague at the University of East Anglia, Karen Schaller, teaches her novel Ice on her course Fiction After Modernism. Her books are kept in print out of sheer dedication by her publisher, Peter Owen. It’s not quite correct to say that Anna Kavan has been forgotten. No guarantees that even if you are a visionary and original writer, you will not be forgotten as soon as your last book is out of print. Being a writer is a no-guarantee profession: there are no guarantees that you will be published and, if you do, you will be read and understood.

Ice novel anna kavan