Let Me Alone

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ANNA KAVAN found an apt title for this novel, first published in 1930 under the name of Helen Ferguson. Let Me Alone is an account, from childhood, of isolation in a woman and of her compulsive retreat from any association, especially marriage, that might impinge upon the strange, austere loneliness and solitude she both wanted and mortally dreaded: a schizophrenic condition. She marries — the wrong man inevitably — with predictably disastrous consequences.

This 1930 novel brings to mind today’s Women’s Liberation movement, with its demands for independence of mind and spirit for women. ‘She wanted to go through life alone, in her own independent, detached fashion,’ the heroine meditates, before marrying. ‘The idea of being bound up with another person in such a relationship as marriage was hateful to her.’ After the marriage, she is reading a Life of Luther when ‘… from the midst of the printed page, there suddenly sprang out at her these words: “Here I stand; I can no other,” a great enlightenment came to her, a sudden illumination. In a moment everything was made plain to her…. How easy and simple to face life from the single basis of her own undeniable individuality. She was what she was: herself. No need for compromise or apology or modification or defence.’

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