Kavan's narrative experiment under her new name began with Asylum Piece (1940). Writing in the first person for the first time and introducing the characteristically sparse style that would continue in much of her later work, her elusive and deeply unreliable narrator in these stories (like many of her characters from this time forward) has no history or name; their identity is defined only by negative experiences of emptiness, hopelessness, guilt and persecution. This anonymous but distinctive narrative voice, in turns despairing and affectless, is interspersed with more realist third-person narratives, a combination that would characterise her later fiction. The asylum experience would continue to be a central feature of Kavan's writing throughout the 1940s in stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945) and in the satirical novel The Horse's Tale (1949). These writings represented and responded to mid-century advances in psychiatric treatment (particularly drug and talking therapies), along with a growing critique of psychiatry and asylum incarceration. But these developments were at the sharp end of broader cultural changes in perceptions of subjectivity and human relations, and Kavan's experimental strategies to disturb the reader's relationship with the text would become a wider feature of mid-century writing. The barriers to communication and understanding between the depressed subject and others, and between patient and psychiatrist, touched the same issues of human relations and literary representations addressed by Virginia Woolf and Nathalie Sarraute, as outlined in the introduction to this book, necessitating new ways of writing character. Kavan's experiment in Asylum Piece suggests that the experience of the psychiatric patient, seemingly so outside of normal life, shows in extremis a disrupted relationship to self, others and objective reality that would increase and intensify across the literature of the mid-century.

Notwithstanding the continuities noted in the previous chapter, the shift from Helen Ferguson's psychological realism to the bleak and haunted narratives of her first publication as Anna Kavan is striking. Freed from the constraints of realist plot and character development, much of the narrative work in Asylum Piece is done by ambiguity and inference. Sketched out in language as spare and unornamented as the stark reality it describes, this more experimental mode of writing formalised the representation of profound depression and psychic division experienced by Helen Ferguson's characters.