This book has offered the fullest appraisal of Quin's writing and life to date. I have argued that the precarious writing of Ann Quin is striking precisely because of its unstable shifting between, on the one hand, aesthetic and literary purposes, questions and techniques that aim to transgress, test out and mobilise the possibilities of experi-mental prose and, on the other, its engagement with and destabilising of the wider social, cultural and political questions of the 1960s and 1970s. This is clear in, for example, how the tactile aesthetics of clothes and make-up in Berg are used to depict a shabby seaside setting and performances of gender and desire; how the ambigu-ous collage of journal forms in Three reveal the text's subversion of marriage and class, as well as enabling its consideration of sexual violence; how the disrupted sequencing of the woman's sections in Passages reconsider sexuality in the era of free love, and how the fragmented sections of the man's journal question the woman's ambivalent desire and British attitudes to Jewishness; the critique of both the counter-culture and consumer culture via impoverished style, cliché and the cut-up in Tripticks; and the activation of stereotypes and unravelling of cliché to engage with questions of madness and the cold war in The Unmapped Country. The short interchapters between the critical chapters have created an oblique structure pertinent and sensitive to Quin. The aim of these biographical vignettes has been to resonate with, extend and enrich the literary critical work of the main chapters and to encourage a sideways reading between life and writing, rather than to be read as if giving access to the ‘person’ or secret of Ann Quin.

With my primary focus on the major works, I have not had space in this book for sustained engagement with Quin's short stories, except for some analysis of ‘Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails’ and the unpublished ‘Matters of the Heart’. Most of her ‘stories and fragments’, written across the 1960s and early 1970s, were published together for the first time in The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments.