Ann Quin was of a rare breed in British writing: experimental, working class and a woman. The author of four novels and a prolific writer of short stories and fragments (as well as memoir, poetry, and radio and television plays), she was born in Brighton in 1936 to what used to be called an unmarried mother. In “Leaving School – XI”, a piece of memoir-writing, she describes her “sense of sin” and “great lust to find out” that took her to London, where she worked as a secretary by day and wrote her strange, singular novels by night – her typewriter clattering away into the early hours.
A newspaper profile from 1965 describes her “marvellously cluttered” bed-sitting room in Notting Hill Gate. The walls are a pasted-up montage of torn pages from magazines and art postcards – painters, playwrights, French film stars. The shelves teem with paperbacks; there’s her typewriter, of course, and a collection of esoteric knick-knacks.
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