What do you think?
Rate this book
A Stranger Still
A strong early novel first published in 1935 under the name of Helen Ferguson. Set in the 1930s, in Bohemian London, Paris, and southern France, the story concerns a rich family and their financial and emotional vicissitudes. The autobiographical element (repression in childhood) is implicit for those familiar with the author's enigmatic life. The author actually identified so strongly with the glacial character of Anna Kavan that she subsequently wrote under that name. Her stories are...rich with a fresh kind of peril."" - New York Times.
302 pages, Hardcover
First published October 20, 1995
1 person is currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Anna Kavan
39 books483 followersAnna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents.
Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. The change in her writing style and physical appearance coincided with a mental breakdown. During this time, Helen also renamed herself Anna Kavan after a character in her own novel Let Me Alone.
Around 1926 Anna became addicted to heroin. Her addiction has been described as an attempt to self-medicate rather than recreational. Kavan made no apologies for her heroin usage. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life.
Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. The change in her writing style and physical appearance coincided with a mental breakdown. During this time, Helen also renamed herself Anna Kavan after a character in her own novel Let Me Alone.
Around 1926 Anna became addicted to heroin. Her addiction has been described as an attempt to self-medicate rather than recreational. Kavan made no apologies for her heroin usage. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 20, 2019
(Two and a half stars, with the grain of salt that this is fascinating Kavan context and an entirely competent act of disaffected 30s prose -- it's just not the sort of thing I'd necessarily be that interested in were it not for the Kavan-context.)
This is the 4th of the 6 Helen Ferguson novels across the 30s, the second, following Let Me Alone, to concern the character of Anna Kavan, who would soon supercede Ferguson as the actual author of her books. Anyone familiar with Ferguson/Kavan's life knows essentially what takes place in Let Me Alone: brushed aside into the first easy marriage that presents itself, Anna Kavan is removed from her early literary aspirations and encaged in a life among strangers as the wife of a bureaucrat in the Far East. Unlike their later doppelgängers in despair in Who Are You? and A Scarcity of Love, however, Kavan and Ferguson both escaped that fate and fled back to Europe.
Here, Kavan is back in London (then in the south of France, amid an ensemble cast whose story this more precisely seems to be), now 25 years old and determined to seize control of a life that has seemed to happen without her for too long. The latter makes her a refreshingly independent and active version of herself, a reminder that her real-life counterpart did indeed escape and seize the reigns of her life, rather than become trapped in static forms or drowned in a reflecting pool.
Of course, this precedes Kavan the character's ascension into Kavan the author, so it also precedes her tonal and formal experiments, instead rendered as a precise but more ordinary melodrama. Still, the wider scope, and reduced self-interrogation, actually makes this intriguingly one of the least self-typical of her works I've encountered, more a story of the collapse of a business dynasty into the still-formless despair of the 30s that would culminate in WWII shortly after. Strangely, the character of Kavan herself here is somewhat outside of the main plotline. She brushes against it and carries with her the main thematic content: the hopeless disconnection and alienation of all the characters as they avoid attachment or responsibility in favor of various buzzwords of young modern aspiration: freedom, independence, individualism, all of which seem far from likely to make anyone happy and end the story in a lonely act of artistic creation which perhaps reflects the composition of the book itself.
This is the 4th of the 6 Helen Ferguson novels across the 30s, the second, following Let Me Alone, to concern the character of Anna Kavan, who would soon supercede Ferguson as the actual author of her books. Anyone familiar with Ferguson/Kavan's life knows essentially what takes place in Let Me Alone: brushed aside into the first easy marriage that presents itself, Anna Kavan is removed from her early literary aspirations and encaged in a life among strangers as the wife of a bureaucrat in the Far East. Unlike their later doppelgängers in despair in Who Are You? and A Scarcity of Love, however, Kavan and Ferguson both escaped that fate and fled back to Europe.
Here, Kavan is back in London (then in the south of France, amid an ensemble cast whose story this more precisely seems to be), now 25 years old and determined to seize control of a life that has seemed to happen without her for too long. The latter makes her a refreshingly independent and active version of herself, a reminder that her real-life counterpart did indeed escape and seize the reigns of her life, rather than become trapped in static forms or drowned in a reflecting pool.
Of course, this precedes Kavan the character's ascension into Kavan the author, so it also precedes her tonal and formal experiments, instead rendered as a precise but more ordinary melodrama. Still, the wider scope, and reduced self-interrogation, actually makes this intriguingly one of the least self-typical of her works I've encountered, more a story of the collapse of a business dynasty into the still-formless despair of the 30s that would culminate in WWII shortly after. Strangely, the character of Kavan herself here is somewhat outside of the main plotline. She brushes against it and carries with her the main thematic content: the hopeless disconnection and alienation of all the characters as they avoid attachment or responsibility in favor of various buzzwords of young modern aspiration: freedom, independence, individualism, all of which seem far from likely to make anyone happy and end the story in a lonely act of artistic creation which perhaps reflects the composition of the book itself.
April 22, 2021
In which the portentous character of 'Anna Kavan' steals the show with her 'cold grey eyes' and whose 'will to control her life was intact and solid as ice'. (3.5, rounded up for Anna)
January 31, 2018
I loved this right up until the very end. I feel like it needed one or two more chapters to really wrap things up. Knowing that this is the book from whence Anna Kavan got her name probably colored my reading as well. As the (fictional) Anna wasn't the central character, it made the book feel off-balance. She has both too much significance...and not enough, and not enough anything to feel deliberate, if that makes any sense! As always with Anna, the prose is lovely and the psychology is astute.
(Of course, I prefer her experimental works.)
(Of course, I prefer her experimental works.)
July 6, 2014
One of the "Home Counties novels" originally published under her married name Helen Ferguson (note: "Anna Kavan" was not a "pseudonym", she changed her name officially), this is the second to feature the character "Anna Kavan" from whom the name was taken. The story isn't actually confined to the south-east, or even to London, and roves over the world. We get scenes in Burma of the husband Anna left behind; we go to the south of France and Italy. The big canvas has big themes in it as well: business intrigues, the downfall of a complacent patriarch, the need for an artist to cut off close attachments. Anna is perfectly aware of her own egotism and dependence, and desires to change. She has read Nietzsche and psychoanalysis is in the background as well: this is a world where characters can be derailed by nagging images and phrases whose significance they don't grasp, whilst French clinicians ponder the line between physical and psychological factors in illness. Along the way we see a divorce conducted in the old-fashioned way (detectives to ascertain infidelity, as in "A Handful Of Dust", but not played for laughs), and there is some consideration for the life and troubles of a working class character: the chauffeur who shuttles the glittering beings around. The "work girls" in the hat shop don't get much attention, however. There is still a hierarchy of concern, and lower-class females are neglected at the bottom of it. There is not a lot of political awareness: a Blackshirt is visible in the distance in Italy, but not thought about too much.
Nobody ends this story in the same place they started at, Anna Kavan seems to have learnt something and believes she is growing. Reading this novel makes me wish all the Helen Ferguson novels were available in new editions, and it puts her post-war novels in a completely different light.
Nobody ends this story in the same place they started at, Anna Kavan seems to have learnt something and believes she is growing. Reading this novel makes me wish all the Helen Ferguson novels were available in new editions, and it puts her post-war novels in a completely different light.
July 31, 2015
i rly liked parts of this but im so bad at reading books where there's like 900 characters oop
September 11, 2025
I was finally able to read this novel at the University of Toronto's Robarts Library and cross it off my Anna Kavan list. Soon, believe it or not, I will have read all of her published fiction, with only the unpublished stuff in her archives at the University of Tulsa left to tackle.
A Stranger Still is a decent novel with flashes of Helen Ferguson's future alter-ego, particularly the dark, final episode of Anna Kavan, the character whose name the author later took as her own, in Part III, Chapter 5. But unlike the author's later work, the novel remains heavily grounded in realism. It contains a broad spattering of autobiography, mixed into a jumbled yarn that concludes strongly and suggestively with the door just cracked enough for the reader to enter and figure more.
Its not exactly a novel I would recommend on its merit alone, but it is essential for scholars or anyone interested in the literature of Anna Kavan.
Postscript: a short excerpt from the novel, a monumental moment out of context, for fun, since it is so difficult to acquire and read any part of it:
She stood there under the silvery trees, in the birdless silence, seeing the sunshine swim between the trees, feeling she had crossed some boundary. She stood with her hand on the great, gnarled trunk of an olive tree. Martin waited beside her. Wind came stirring through the leaves. They waited beside the big tree-trunk for the rustling approach of the wind.
Between the grey foliage and the huge twisted trunks the abandoned house gleamed vacantly. The white shell of the house was intact, but the windows were empty black holes and part of the roof had fallen in. Some planks were nailed over the door. Anna felt uneasy, it looked so desolate in the bright, unbreakable hush and loneliness of the afternoon. Martin was beside her, gazing at the place with an odd sort of half-feigned playfulness. His eyes had taken on a strangely hostile and secretive look. She did not understand him. Standing in front of the empty house she felt almost nervous of the secret look in his eyes.
“I wonder if there’s a Token inside,” he said to her.
He began to go forward towards the house. With vague uneasiness she watched him walk up the steps to the boarded door. Coarse brownish grass grew in the crannies of the crumbling stone steps.
“What is a Token?” she asked.
“A kind of ghost,” he answered, still withdrawn from her in spite of his teasing smile.
She watched him lounging carelessly in front of the nailed-up door. He looked frank and easy-going, with his broad shoulders, and his face so naïve and brown. Yet there was that peculiar reservation about him; he was not quite all that he appeared to be. He looked now as if he were playing a childish game. He put out a hand to knock on the fastened door, then let it fall again, changing his mind.
“What does the Token do?” she asked him. “Does it always live in an empty house?”
“It lives in an empty house, and no one ever sees it,” he said.
“Then how do you know if it’s there?”
He smiled in a playful way that was not quite sincere, not quite spontaneous.
“It comes to the inside of the door if you knock,” he replied. “You can hear it coming up to the door.”
“What an eccentric ghost,” she said, smiling. But she was slightly uneasy. Something about the silence, and the empty house, and Martin’s behaviour was discomforting to her.
“Yes,” said Martin, “a Token is a queer sort of ghost, and it’s got a queer sort of power, too. It’s got power to give the person who knocks the right of taking someone else’s troubles on himself. If I knock on that door now, and the Token comes, I can take all your suffering, mental and physical, upon myself for the rest of our lives.”
This statement was made in the lighthearted tone that rang just a little bit false. Martin had that curious manner just then: he seemed to be smiling misleadingly on top of his real thoughts, not giving himself away at all.
“Would you do that for me?” she asked.
And with that baffling, secretive smile he answered:
“Of course I would. . . . Shall I knock?”
“No, don’t,” she said quickly, taking a step towards him.
A Stranger Still is a decent novel with flashes of Helen Ferguson's future alter-ego, particularly the dark, final episode of Anna Kavan, the character whose name the author later took as her own, in Part III, Chapter 5. But unlike the author's later work, the novel remains heavily grounded in realism. It contains a broad spattering of autobiography, mixed into a jumbled yarn that concludes strongly and suggestively with the door just cracked enough for the reader to enter and figure more.
Its not exactly a novel I would recommend on its merit alone, but it is essential for scholars or anyone interested in the literature of Anna Kavan.
Postscript: a short excerpt from the novel, a monumental moment out of context, for fun, since it is so difficult to acquire and read any part of it:
She stood there under the silvery trees, in the birdless silence, seeing the sunshine swim between the trees, feeling she had crossed some boundary. She stood with her hand on the great, gnarled trunk of an olive tree. Martin waited beside her. Wind came stirring through the leaves. They waited beside the big tree-trunk for the rustling approach of the wind.
Between the grey foliage and the huge twisted trunks the abandoned house gleamed vacantly. The white shell of the house was intact, but the windows were empty black holes and part of the roof had fallen in. Some planks were nailed over the door. Anna felt uneasy, it looked so desolate in the bright, unbreakable hush and loneliness of the afternoon. Martin was beside her, gazing at the place with an odd sort of half-feigned playfulness. His eyes had taken on a strangely hostile and secretive look. She did not understand him. Standing in front of the empty house she felt almost nervous of the secret look in his eyes.
“I wonder if there’s a Token inside,” he said to her.
He began to go forward towards the house. With vague uneasiness she watched him walk up the steps to the boarded door. Coarse brownish grass grew in the crannies of the crumbling stone steps.
“What is a Token?” she asked.
“A kind of ghost,” he answered, still withdrawn from her in spite of his teasing smile.
She watched him lounging carelessly in front of the nailed-up door. He looked frank and easy-going, with his broad shoulders, and his face so naïve and brown. Yet there was that peculiar reservation about him; he was not quite all that he appeared to be. He looked now as if he were playing a childish game. He put out a hand to knock on the fastened door, then let it fall again, changing his mind.
“What does the Token do?” she asked him. “Does it always live in an empty house?”
“It lives in an empty house, and no one ever sees it,” he said.
“Then how do you know if it’s there?”
He smiled in a playful way that was not quite sincere, not quite spontaneous.
“It comes to the inside of the door if you knock,” he replied. “You can hear it coming up to the door.”
“What an eccentric ghost,” she said, smiling. But she was slightly uneasy. Something about the silence, and the empty house, and Martin’s behaviour was discomforting to her.
“Yes,” said Martin, “a Token is a queer sort of ghost, and it’s got a queer sort of power, too. It’s got power to give the person who knocks the right of taking someone else’s troubles on himself. If I knock on that door now, and the Token comes, I can take all your suffering, mental and physical, upon myself for the rest of our lives.”
This statement was made in the lighthearted tone that rang just a little bit false. Martin had that curious manner just then: he seemed to be smiling misleadingly on top of his real thoughts, not giving himself away at all.
“Would you do that for me?” she asked.
And with that baffling, secretive smile he answered:
“Of course I would. . . . Shall I knock?”
“No, don’t,” she said quickly, taking a step towards him.
February 29, 2020
I adored this book. I got very interested in the author after reading Ice. I wanted to start at the beginning with the Helen Ferguson novels. I am so disappointed that they haven’t all been reprinted. So far I have gotten my hands on two more, but they are not cheap! I do hope someday scholars will anthologize and re-print these works.
January 19, 2015
**all my reviews contain spoilers**
I had written a review immediately after reading this book, and decided to delete that one and write a new one. Sometimes it takes a little while to digest a story and understand the message(s) it was trying to get across; and that is what happened with this book. I originally had written that there were lots of different characters, opposed to one main protagonist and felt that all of them had their own separate trials to go through, although all characters were connected to each other in some way. This is true, although, after thinking on it for a little while, it is very clear: this is a book about loss. All the characters in this novel have lost something: a marriage, a life-long business, property, friendships, integrity, and love...among other things.
Although the novel is very very slow, which is why I think I felt initially annoyed when I first finished it, there are stories there, and quite deep and painful ones, if you try to understand them a little. It's about opportunities missed, and having regrets, and second-guessing decisions, wanting to love but being afraid to ... there is a lot of those things intertwined with the behavior of these characters. I initially gave the book 2-stars for its very slow pace, but I changed it to 3-stars because I believe that sometimes the messages within a story will not immediately slap you in the face right away, but may quietly leave a mark that takes a little more time to understand.
I had written a review immediately after reading this book, and decided to delete that one and write a new one. Sometimes it takes a little while to digest a story and understand the message(s) it was trying to get across; and that is what happened with this book. I originally had written that there were lots of different characters, opposed to one main protagonist and felt that all of them had their own separate trials to go through, although all characters were connected to each other in some way. This is true, although, after thinking on it for a little while, it is very clear: this is a book about loss. All the characters in this novel have lost something: a marriage, a life-long business, property, friendships, integrity, and love...among other things.
Although the novel is very very slow, which is why I think I felt initially annoyed when I first finished it, there are stories there, and quite deep and painful ones, if you try to understand them a little. It's about opportunities missed, and having regrets, and second-guessing decisions, wanting to love but being afraid to ... there is a lot of those things intertwined with the behavior of these characters. I initially gave the book 2-stars for its very slow pace, but I changed it to 3-stars because I believe that sometimes the messages within a story will not immediately slap you in the face right away, but may quietly leave a mark that takes a little more time to understand.
March 16, 2013
Poetic and perverse, this novel by Helen Ferguson is about a character called Anna Kavan. The author stole her name, and her hair colour, reinventing herself and her work, becoming the platinum blonde experimentalist in her spacecraft somewhere between earth and planet illusion.
Kavan's early fiction is interesting because it contains elements of her later better books; showing reveal that talent isn't enough. The difference between a good writer and a great one is hard work.
Writing is hard work. You have to sit around so much in silk pyjamas, really doing something.
Kavan's early fiction is interesting because it contains elements of her later better books; showing reveal that talent isn't enough. The difference between a good writer and a great one is hard work.
Writing is hard work. You have to sit around so much in silk pyjamas, really doing something.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews