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The work of Ann Quin
This is just a brief guide - still very, very much under construction - to the work Ann Quin. Born in Brighton in 1936, Quin killed herself in 1973. She wrote two manuscripts before her first novel Berg was accepted for publication by John Calder in 1964. The success of Berg (filmed in 1989 by director Michael Austin as Killing Dad) allowed Quin the means to travel throughout Europe and the United States. Before she set off on her journey, however, she had virtually completed another novel Three, which was published in 1966. It was in Three that Quin developed the narrative techniques and tone she would later build upon in her novels Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), both of which are based on her travels in Europe and the United States. Quin was at work on a fifth novel, The Unmapped Country, at the time of her death in 1973. A fragment of this work was published in Beyond the Words (Hutchinson, 1975), a collection of experimental writing edited by Giles Gordon.
Further reading: Ann Quin page at Dalkey Archive (where most of the information on this page is directly taken from) and the complete-review's Quin page. See also Christine Fox's essay Lyrics from the lacuna. Two pieces of substantive criticism exist: an in-depth overview of Quin’s work by Philip Stevick in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, a collection of essays on women’s experimental writing edited by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton University Press, 1989); and an essay by Judith Mackrell in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 14, British Novelists Since 1960, pt. 2. (Gale, 1983). There is also a useful piece in Susan Strehle's Fiction in the Quantum Universe (The University of North Carolina Press).
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