A Scarcity of Love was published by Angus and Robertson in 1956. The novel is Kavan’s most conventionally structured work — it has recognizable characters, a linear plot, and realistic settings — but its emotional content is pure Kavan: a woman’s experience of being fundamentally unable to connect with other human beings, not because she does not want connection but because some essential mechanism for achieving it is missing or broken.
The protagonist arrives at a house party on the English coast. The other guests are charming, witty, socially competent people who navigate the rituals of conversation, flirtation, and shared meals with an ease that she cannot match. She watches them perform the small acts of intimacy — a touch on the arm, a shared joke, an offer of a drink — that constitute social life, and she cannot replicate them. Every attempt at connection fails: she says the wrong thing, or says nothing, or says the right thing in the wrong tone. The other guests are not hostile; they simply cannot see her as she is.
Kavan renders this experience without self-pity or melodrama. The prose is calm, observational, almost clinical — the narrator describes her own social failure with the detachment of a scientist observing an experiment. The effect is devastating precisely because it is so controlled: the reader feels the protagonist’s isolation more acutely because she refuses to dramatize it.
Collecting A Scarcity of Love
First edition (Angus and Robertson, Sydney/London, 1956): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good: $75–$200