Eagle’s Nest was published by Peter Owen in London in 1957. The novella follows a woman who retreats from the world to a house perched high in the mountains — an eagle’s nest, isolated, exposed to weather, removed from human contact. The retreat is not dramatic (there is no crisis, no flight from persecution) but gradual: the woman simply stops participating in social life, stops maintaining connections, stops going down the mountain.
The narrative tracks the consequences of this withdrawal with Kavan’s characteristic precision. The house becomes simultaneously a refuge and a trap. The mountain landscape — beautiful, harsh, indifferent — mirrors the woman’s psychological state: stripped of the distractions and comforts of social existence, she is left with herself, and what she finds there is not peace but a void. The outside world recedes — not because it ceases to exist but because the woman’s capacity to perceive it diminishes.
The novella anticipates Ice in several respects: the hostile landscape that encroaches on human space, the woman who is simultaneously the center of the narrative and its most passive element, and the sense that withdrawal from the world is not an escape from danger but a different form of danger — the danger of dissolution, of losing the self by removing it from the contexts that gave it definition.
Collecting Eagle’s Nest
First edition (Peter Owen, London, 1957): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $60–$150