The British avant-garde writer Ann Quin (1936-1973) is experiencing something of a renaissance. However, The Unmapped Country (1973), Quin's final, unfinished book, and my focus here, has not (until now) been widely available, and so has not yet been part of this discussion. 1 This article argues that Unmapped is a key text in Quin's oeuvre. While Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972) are all differently concerned with heightened, fragmented, multiple, elusive, allusive and chaotic psychiatric states, Unmapped explicitly deals with the state of-and therefore with the possibility of the representation of-madness. In her lifetime, Quin's work was criticised for the increasingly radical nature of its experimentation and escalating intertextuality, while this last text was praised for its seeming return to a more familiar form. In fact, as my reading demonstrates, the text continues and extends Quin's earlier interrogation and troubling of questions of narrative representation. In 1972-1973, Quin was studying at Hillcroft Women's College, an environment and occupation which provided respite from increasingly severe mental breakdowns and periods of psychosis. There, in February 1973, she wrote an essay on George Eliot's Middlemarch and suffragism; at the same time, she re-read Eliot's Daniel Deronda and was working on Unmapped. The title of Unmapped is taken from a moment in Daniel Deronda where the question of the elusive, unknowable nature of the psyche is raised as well as how it might be possible to represent, narrate, or know this, alerts us to the fact that Quin's text has similar concerns. 2 I begin by considering that Daniel Deronda passage, in order to draw out the
