‘Anna Kavan’ first appeared as a character in Helen Ferguson's Bildungsroman, Let Me Alone (1930); in the first quotation above, she self-consciously claims her new, married name to the publisher whose rejection ended her writing aspirations. Ten years later, after using Anna Kavan as a pen name for less than a year, Helen Ferguson would write to her lover to make this claim herself with more assurance: ‘Only call me Anna Kavan.’ The parallels between Anna's story and episodes in Helen Ferguson's life have made Let Me Alone the source of much apocryphal Kavan biography, yet she did not consider her writing to be autobiographical, claiming towards the end of her career that ‘I can only write fiction’ and ‘I’ve often started autobiographical things, but never finished them.’ Taking the name of her own fictional creation, coupled with her habit of writing un-named and ill-defined protagonists, has worked retroactively on interpretations of both Kavan's life and work, and been taken as an open invitation to read her fiction as autobiography. Her anonymous characters have been commonly understood as figures that stand in for their author and her rejection of plot and characterisation left a blank space into which others have written their stories of her life and personality.