Valentine Ackland
Encyclopedia
Valentine Ackland was an English poet
, an important figure in the emergence of modernism
in twentieth-century British poetry.
dentist, worked at making a symbolic son of Molly, teaching her to shoot rifles and to box. This attention to Molly made her sister Joan immensely jealous. Older by eight years, Joan psychologically tormented and physically abused Molly as a way of unleashing her jealousy and anger.
Molly received an Anglo-Catholic upbringing in Norfolk
and a convent school education in London. In 1925 at the age of nineteen, she impetuously married Richard Turpin, a homosexual youth who was unable to consummate their marriage. Upon her marriage, she was also received into the Catholic
church, a religion that she later abandoned, returned to, and then abandoned again in the last decade of her life. In less than a year, she had her marriage to Turpin annulled, and, despite numerous pleas from her family and much psychological pressure from them, never returned to a serious relationship with a man again.
Alert to social mores of her day, she became aware of societal patterns of male privilege
and female submission set about challenging the female gender identifications expected of her. She took to wearing men’s clothing, cut her hair in a short style called the Eton crop, and was at times mistaken for a handsome young boy. She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s. Her poetry appeared in British and American literary journals during the 1920s to the 1940s, but Valentine deeply regretted that she never became a noted and widely read poet. In this regard, a good deal of her poetry was published posthumously, and she received little attention from critics until a revival of interest in her work in the 1970s.
In 1930, Valentine was introduced to the short story
writer and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner
with whom she had a lifelong relationship, albeit tumultuous at times given Valentine’s increasing alcoholism and infidelities. Sylvia was twelve years older than Valentine, and the two lived together until Valentine’s death from breast cancer
in 1969. Warner went on to outlive Ackland by nine years, dying in 1978. The pair were together for thirty-nine years. Valentine’s reflections upon her relationship with Sylvia and the latter's long affair with the American heiress and writer Elizabeth Wade White (1908–1994) were posthumously published in “For Sylvia: An Honest Account” (1985).
Valentine was a highly emotional woman prone to numerous self-doubts and shifts in emotions and intellectual interests. She was responsible for involving Sylvia in membership in the Communist Party
in the 1930s and in the Spanish civil war as well as numerous socialist and pacifist activities. The two women’s involvement in the Communist Party came under investigation by the British government in the late 1930s and remained an open file until 1957, when the investigation was halted
After World War II
, Valentine turned her attention to confessional poetry and a memoir
concerning her relationship with Warner and its many emotional issues as Valentine pursued involvements with other women. At first, Warner was tolerant with her younger lover’s dalliances, but the seriousness and length of Ackland’s relationship with Elizabeth Wade White was distressing to Warner and also pushed her relationship with Ackland to the edge. Ackland’s distresses at loving two women simultaneously and of endeavoring to balance her feelings for each woman with the responsibilities and commitments of her primary relationship with Warner are presented openly in Ackland’s poetry and in her memoir of this period.
Ackland was struggling with additional doubts and conflicts during this period as well. She continued to battle her alcoholism, and she was undergoing shifts in her political and religious alliances. Doubts about her sexual identity and her identity as a poet as well as about her Christian
faith and her political convictions are evident in her poetry.
In 1934, Ackland and Warner produced a volume of poetry, “Whether a Dove or a Seagull” that was an unusual and democratic experiment in writing as none of the poems are ascribed to either author. The volume was also an attempt by Warner to introduce Ackland to publication as Warner had an already established reputation as a novelist, and her work was widely read in the 1930s. The volume was controversial for its frank discussion of lesbianism at a time and in a society in which lesbianism was regarded as deviant and immoral behaviour.
In 1937, Ackland and Warner moved from Dorset
to a house near Dorchester. Both became involved with Communist ideals and issues, with Ackland writing a column called “Country Dealings” concerning rural poverty for the “Daily Worker” and the “Left Review.” In 1939, the two women attended the American Writers Congress in New York City
to consider the loss of democracy
in Europe
and returned when World War II broke out. Ackland’s poetry of this period attempted to capture the political dynamics she saw at work, but she had a difficult time as a poetry mastering the craft of combining political polemics with her natural tendency toward lyrical expression. In a similar vein, her distress over the loss of democracy in Europe became a broader identification with Existentialism
and the sense that the human condition itself was hopeless.
Ackland died on 9 November 1969 from breast cancer
that had metastasised to her lungs. She was buried in a churchyard at Chaldon Herring with the inscription ("Death is not the end") on her gravestone.
and Anne Sexton
. Of interest, too, is Ackland explorations of terminal illness as her life was drawing to a close from cancer. In her later years, Ackland turned from Catholicism
to Quaker beliefs and also to involvement with issues of environmentalism
.
In overall assessment, Milford considers the two-minds at work in Ackland’s work. She cites as examples Ackland’s focus on optimism and dread, the longing for emotional closeness and the fear of intimacy, self-assertion and self-negation, the search for privacy and solitude amidst the longing for connection and social acceptance as a lesbian and as a noteworthy poet. In this regard, Ackland shares much thematically—though not in artistic achievement—with metaphysical poets
like John Donne
and Philip Larkin
in the effort to see personal experience from multiple perspectives and never fully resting with one perspective or another.
A contemporary examination of Ackland’s poetry and essays was published by Carcanet Press
in 2008 titled “Journey from Winter: Selected Poems.” The volume is edited by Francis Bingham, who also provides a contextual and critical introduction.
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, an important figure in the emergence of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
in twentieth-century British poetry.
Life
Born Mary Kathleen Valentine Ackland and nicknamed Molly by her family, Ackland was the child of privilege and of emotional abuse and neglect. With no sons born to the family, Valentine’s father Robert, a West End LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
dentist, worked at making a symbolic son of Molly, teaching her to shoot rifles and to box. This attention to Molly made her sister Joan immensely jealous. Older by eight years, Joan psychologically tormented and physically abused Molly as a way of unleashing her jealousy and anger.
Molly received an Anglo-Catholic upbringing in Norfolk
Norfolk
Norfolk is a low-lying county in the East of England. It has borders with Lincolnshire to the west, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea coast and to the north-west the county is bordered by The Wash. The county...
and a convent school education in London. In 1925 at the age of nineteen, she impetuously married Richard Turpin, a homosexual youth who was unable to consummate their marriage. Upon her marriage, she was also received into the Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
church, a religion that she later abandoned, returned to, and then abandoned again in the last decade of her life. In less than a year, she had her marriage to Turpin annulled, and, despite numerous pleas from her family and much psychological pressure from them, never returned to a serious relationship with a man again.
Alert to social mores of her day, she became aware of societal patterns of male privilege
Male privilege
Male privilege is a sociological term that refers quite generally to the special rights or status granted to men in a society, on the basis of their sex or gender, but usually denied to women and/or transsexuals....
and female submission set about challenging the female gender identifications expected of her. She took to wearing men’s clothing, cut her hair in a short style called the Eton crop, and was at times mistaken for a handsome young boy. She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s. Her poetry appeared in British and American literary journals during the 1920s to the 1940s, but Valentine deeply regretted that she never became a noted and widely read poet. In this regard, a good deal of her poetry was published posthumously, and she received little attention from critics until a revival of interest in her work in the 1970s.
In 1930, Valentine was introduced to the short story
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
writer and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner was an English novelist and poet.-Life:Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora Hudleston...
with whom she had a lifelong relationship, albeit tumultuous at times given Valentine’s increasing alcoholism and infidelities. Sylvia was twelve years older than Valentine, and the two lived together until Valentine’s death from breast cancer
Breast cancer
Breast cancer is cancer originating from breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk. Cancers originating from ducts are known as ductal carcinomas; those originating from lobules are known as lobular carcinomas...
in 1969. Warner went on to outlive Ackland by nine years, dying in 1978. The pair were together for thirty-nine years. Valentine’s reflections upon her relationship with Sylvia and the latter's long affair with the American heiress and writer Elizabeth Wade White (1908–1994) were posthumously published in “For Sylvia: An Honest Account” (1985).
Valentine was a highly emotional woman prone to numerous self-doubts and shifts in emotions and intellectual interests. She was responsible for involving Sylvia in membership in the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
in the 1930s and in the Spanish civil war as well as numerous socialist and pacifist activities. The two women’s involvement in the Communist Party came under investigation by the British government in the late 1930s and remained an open file until 1957, when the investigation was halted
After World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Valentine turned her attention to confessional poetry and a memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
concerning her relationship with Warner and its many emotional issues as Valentine pursued involvements with other women. At first, Warner was tolerant with her younger lover’s dalliances, but the seriousness and length of Ackland’s relationship with Elizabeth Wade White was distressing to Warner and also pushed her relationship with Ackland to the edge. Ackland’s distresses at loving two women simultaneously and of endeavoring to balance her feelings for each woman with the responsibilities and commitments of her primary relationship with Warner are presented openly in Ackland’s poetry and in her memoir of this period.
Ackland was struggling with additional doubts and conflicts during this period as well. She continued to battle her alcoholism, and she was undergoing shifts in her political and religious alliances. Doubts about her sexual identity and her identity as a poet as well as about her Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
faith and her political convictions are evident in her poetry.
In 1934, Ackland and Warner produced a volume of poetry, “Whether a Dove or a Seagull” that was an unusual and democratic experiment in writing as none of the poems are ascribed to either author. The volume was also an attempt by Warner to introduce Ackland to publication as Warner had an already established reputation as a novelist, and her work was widely read in the 1930s. The volume was controversial for its frank discussion of lesbianism at a time and in a society in which lesbianism was regarded as deviant and immoral behaviour.
In 1937, Ackland and Warner moved from Dorset
Dorset
Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...
to a house near Dorchester. Both became involved with Communist ideals and issues, with Ackland writing a column called “Country Dealings” concerning rural poverty for the “Daily Worker” and the “Left Review.” In 1939, the two women attended the American Writers Congress in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
to consider the loss of democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and returned when World War II broke out. Ackland’s poetry of this period attempted to capture the political dynamics she saw at work, but she had a difficult time as a poetry mastering the craft of combining political polemics with her natural tendency toward lyrical expression. In a similar vein, her distress over the loss of democracy in Europe became a broader identification with Existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
and the sense that the human condition itself was hopeless.
Ackland died on 9 November 1969 from breast cancer
Breast cancer
Breast cancer is cancer originating from breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk. Cancers originating from ducts are known as ductal carcinomas; those originating from lobules are known as lobular carcinomas...
that had metastasised to her lungs. She was buried in a churchyard at Chaldon Herring with the inscription ("Death is not the end") on her gravestone.
Critical assessment
Ackland’s poetry—largely neglected after the 1940s—came into a resurgence of interest with the emergence of both women’s studies and of lesbian literature. Contemporary critical reaction finds much to value in Ackland’s poetry and confessional writings, which are of historical interest to the development of self-reflective, modernist poetry, and to the political and cultural issues of the 1930s and 1940s. One example of a recent critical analysis is Wendy Milford’s 1988 study, “This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland." With regard to her self-reflection as a poet, Ackland exhibits themes and explorations similar to poets like Sylvia PlathSylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...
and Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967...
. Of interest, too, is Ackland explorations of terminal illness as her life was drawing to a close from cancer. In her later years, Ackland turned from Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
to Quaker beliefs and also to involvement with issues of environmentalism
Environmentalism
Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the concerns of non-human elements...
.
In overall assessment, Milford considers the two-minds at work in Ackland’s work. She cites as examples Ackland’s focus on optimism and dread, the longing for emotional closeness and the fear of intimacy, self-assertion and self-negation, the search for privacy and solitude amidst the longing for connection and social acceptance as a lesbian and as a noteworthy poet. In this regard, Ackland shares much thematically—though not in artistic achievement—with metaphysical poets
Metaphysical poets
The metaphysical poets is a term coined by the poet and critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them, and whose work was characterized by inventiveness of metaphor...
like John Donne
John Donne
John Donne 31 March 1631), English poet, satirist, lawyer, and priest, is now considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are notable for their strong and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs,...
and Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...
in the effort to see personal experience from multiple perspectives and never fully resting with one perspective or another.
A contemporary examination of Ackland’s poetry and essays was published by Carcanet Press
Carcanet Press
Carcanet Press is a publisher, primarily of poetry, based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1969 by Michael Schmidt.Carcanet Press is now in its fourth decade. In 2000 it was named the Sunday Times millennium Small Publisher of the Year...
in 2008 titled “Journey from Winter: Selected Poems.” The volume is edited by Francis Bingham, who also provides a contextual and critical introduction.