My Soul in China: A Novella and Stories was published by Peter Owen in London in 1975, seven years after Kavan’s death. The collection gathers some of her final writings — pieces found among her papers, some apparently complete, others fragmentary — along with stories that had appeared in magazines but never been collected.
The title novella is set in an unnamed Asian country that combines features of Burma, China, and the generalized “Orient” of colonial imagination. The narrator is a woman traveling through this landscape, but the journey is as much psychological as geographical: the settings dissolve and reform, locations shift without transition, and the distinction between the narrator’s inner and outer worlds is never established. “My soul in China” is both a statement of displacement (her essential self is elsewhere, in a place she cannot reach) and a description of the narrative method (the soul operates by Chinese logic — associative, non-linear, resistant to Western categories).
The shorter stories continue themes from Kavan’s earlier work: institutional confinement, the impossibility of human connection, addiction as a form of survival, and landscapes that reflect psychological states rather than geographical realities. The writing is Kavan at her most distilled: sentences pared to essentials, images precise and resonant, emotional content compressed into gestures and objects rather than declared.
Collecting My Soul in China
First edition (Peter Owen, London, 1975): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$250
- Very good: $40–$100