The Essay: Women of Substance

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Women of Substance: Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan

Women of Substance

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Women of Substance, Anna Kavan

Legally prescribed heroin by a psychiatrist, Anna Kavan’s writing reveals her addiction.

Experimental novelist Anna Kavan, described as Kafka’s sister, lived a very private life and only after her death at 68 were her decades of heroin addiction revealed.

As a teenager growing up in Teesside, addiction specialist Professor Sally Marlow discovered the library in Stockton-on-Tees and working her way through the titles began to discover books she designated “strange.” In her twenties she discovered Anna Kavan’s  “Asylum Piece,” and despite having very different life experiences, Anna’s descriptions of mental distress and despair resonated deeply. 

Anna Kavan had a traumatic childhood, abusive relationships, spent time in psychiatric institutions and used heroin for decades. She also wrote experimental fiction and painted furiously. She was a writer’s writer, fans included Anais Nin, J.G.Ballard. Sally wants to know who Anna was and why did she use heroin? Anna is unusual, women who use heroin are rare, about one woman for every 10 men.

Clues exist in Julia and the Bazooka published after Anna’s death, the title story tells of Julia who has a kind doctor who sanctions her drug use. In real life Anna was legally prescribed heroin by her psychiatrist Dr Carl Theodor Bluth. Between 1926 and 1968 the Departmental Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction recommended that medical professionals in the UK could prescribe heroin or morphine to those addicted to it if it would enable the patients to lead useful lives, and created a Home Office register.  Anna was one of the comparatively few people on it. Heroin was considered a medical problem not a criminal problem and as a registered heroin user Anna was spared some of the dangers linked to criminal distribution.

Her relationship to Dr Bluth was platonic but extraordinarily close, and she was distraught when he died.  She painted him in a painting now held at the Museum of the Mind which Sally visits. But even with Dr Bluth’s prescriptions  she died younger than she should have done of heart failure and suffered enormous painful abscesses on her legs, the result of infected injection sites.

As Sally tries to piece together her life she is left with an overwhelming sense of fragments, and the dream-like quality of Anna’s writing adds to the difficulty of getting beyond glimpses of reality. But also despite her addiction Anna produced phenomenal literature.

Presented by Professor Sally Marlow
Produced by Geraldine Fitzgerald
A TellTale Industries Ltd production

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Sally Marlow asks what five women artists can tell us about addiction through their art.

Professor Sally Marlow looks at the work of five women artists and asks what their work can tell us about their addictions and the nature of addiction.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Essay

Women of Substance

Anna Kavan

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3