Journey from Winter: The Poetry of Valentine Ackland

by Valentine Ackland, Frances Bingham (Editor)

Readers of gender studies and gay/lesbian literature will be delighted by these collected works of a dynamic poet whose popularity in the 1930s suffered due to her communist affiliations and notoriety as a lesbian. Complete with an invaluable introduction that provides context into her work, this collection offers sensitive accounts of lesbian love, the evils of war, the socialist struggle, the destruction of the natural world, and the beauty of the Dorset landscape. Spanning almost 50 years, these poems reflect the life experiences of a strong yet complicated woman in the mid-20th century with a voice that is powerfully felt and elegantly controlled.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

124 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2008

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.