Journey From Winter

Selected Poems

Ackland Valentine

Valentine Ackland is best known as the lover of poet Sylvia Townsend Warner, with whom she collaborated on "Whether a Dove or a Seagull" (1934). She was a distinguished poet in her own right, however, and enjoyed popular success during the 1930s. Considered controversial in her times, she was both a lesbian and a communist. Her first poems are highly sensitive accounts of the Dorset landscape, subtly attuned to the rhythms of the sea. She was also an exceptional war poet, writing about the Spanish civil war, life on the home front during the Second World War, and later protests against nuclear weapons. Some of her finest poems are on the subject of the destruction of the natural world.

"Journey From Winter" presents Valentine Ackland's finest compositions alongside a useful contextual introduction by editor Frances Bingham. This "Selected Poems" allows her remarkable achievement to be assessed for the full time, re-establishing her importance in the pantheon of twentieth century women's poetry.

About the Author

Valentine Ackland was born in 1906. Her childhood embraced extremes of privilege and abuse within a wealthy but unhappy family; at nineteen she made a disastrous marriage which lasted less than six months. As a young woman she became notorious for cross-dressing and wild living, but she was also a dedicated poet. She first began writing poems at Chaldon in Dorset, the artists' colony begun by TF Powys, where in 1930 she fell in love with Sylvia Townsend Warner. The two writers lived together in Dorset, and in 1934 they jointly published the erotic and celebratory poetry collection "Whether a Dove or a Seagull". They volunteered for the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War, and were both committed Communists, for a time under surveillance by M15. At the outbreak of the Second World War Ackland moved with Warner to FromeVauchurch, inland from Chaldon, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

In the late 1930s their lives were disrupted by Valentine's infidelities and increasing alcoholism; by the end of the Second World War she no longer drank but she embarked on a serious affair. Although the relationship with Warner survived, it became a stormy one during this period, marked by intellectual disagreements. Ackland's conversion to Catholicism was particularly disturbing to Warner. During her last years Ackland moved towards a Quaker spirituality. The relationship became happier, and the two continued to live together until Ackland's death in 1969.

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