Let Me Alone was published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1930 under the name Helen Ferguson — Kavan’s birth name and the name under which she published her first six novels. The novel is the most directly autobiographical of these early works: Anna-Marie (the protagonist shares a variant of the name Kavan would later adopt) marries Matthew Doyle, a colonial official, and accompanies him to Burma, where she finds herself trapped in a marriage and a way of life that are destroying her.
The novel’s realism is conventional — it belongs to the tradition of the colonial novel and the marriage-problem novel — but its psychological acuity anticipates the later Kavan. Anna-Marie’s experience of Burma is not the adventure or the exotic escape that colonial fiction typically provides; it is an intensification of the claustrophobia she already feels in England. The heat, the insects, the social rituals of the colonial community, and the domestic routines of a marriage she entered without love combine to create a pressure that the protagonist can neither endure nor escape.
The contrast with Who Are You? (1963) — which covers similar autobiographical territory but in Kavan’s mature experimental style — is instructive. Where the later novel dissolves reality into hallucination, Let Me Alone remains firmly realist: the suffering is no less acute, but it is expressed through social detail and psychological observation rather than through formal disruption.
Collecting Let Me Alone
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1930): Cloth with dust jacket. Published as by Helen Ferguson.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $300–$800
- Very good: $100–$300
Early Helen Ferguson novels are scarce and have become increasingly collectible as Kavan’s reputation has grown.