Anna Kavan, like Anaïs Nin with whom she is often compared, is a cult writer. Her work is treasured by people who enjoy its sensitive probing of inner states and who do not require much in the way of narrative technique, imagination, or linguistic richness. The rawness of her personal experience in its rawest unworked state is apparently enough to satisfy. Like many cult figures, her life story is well known (nearly every one of her books contains an Introduction describing her lifelong addiction to heroin and her lonely death in her late sixties) and can be read into every line of her slim narratives. This is fine. But the extent to which this sort of writing has been identified as specifically female is something else again.

While Anna Kavan's work is an interesting example of a minor genre, it hardly makes sense to compare her, as...