Valentine Ackland

The attention to Molly made her elder sister, Joan Alice Elizabeth (born 1898), immensely jealous.

Older by eight years, Joan reportedly psychologically tormented and physically abused Molly.

Molly received an Anglican upbringing in Norfolk and a convent school education in London.

Valentine Ackland (born Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland; 20 May 1906 – 9 November 1969) was an English poet, and life partner of novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Their relationship was strained by Ackland’s infidelities and alcoholism, but survived for nearly forty years.

Both were closely involved with communism, remaining under continued scrutiny by the authorities.

Mary Kathleen Macrory "Molly" Ackland was born 20 May 1906 at 54 Brook Street, London to Robert Craig Ackland and Ruth Kathleen (née Macrory).

Nicknamed "Molly" by her family, she was the younger of two sisters.

With no sons born to the family, her father, a West End London dentist, worked at making a symbolic son of Molly, teaching her to shoot rifles and to box.

Ackland's reflections upon her relationship with Warner and with American heiress and writer Elizabeth Wade White (1908–1994), were posthumously published in For Sylvia: An Honest Account (1985).

She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland in the late 1920s when she decided to become a serious poet.

Her poetry appeared in British and American literary journals during the 1920s to the 1940s, but Ackland deeply regretted that she never became a more widely read poet.

In 1925, at the age of 19, she impetuously married Richard Turpin, a homosexual youth who was unable to consummate their marriage.

Upon her marriage, she was also received into the Roman Catholic Church, a religion that she later abandoned, returned to, and then abandoned again in the last decade of her life.

The consummation was difficult and she had to undergo an operation to stretch her hymen.

In less than a year, she had her marriage to Turpin annulled on the grounds that she was a virgin.

The doctor who performed the examination failed to spot that she was pregnant due to an affair.

Her husband had agreed to adopt the child but she had a miscarriage and she was determined to end the marriage.

She began 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.

Ackland’s poetry did not become widely noticed until after her death, when her reflective, confessional style was more in vogue, and left-wing writers of the 1930s had become a popular topic.

In 1930, Ackland was introduced to the short story writer and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, with whom she would maintain a lifelong (39 years) relationship, albeit tumultuous at times given Ackland's infidelities and increasing alcoholism.

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.

The volume was also an attempt by Warner to introduce Ackland to publication since 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 deemed to be deviant and immoral behaviour.

Ackland was responsible for involving Warner in the Communist Party, which both joined in 1934.

In 1934, Ackland and Warner produced a volume of poetry, "Whether a Dove or a Seagull", an unusual and democratic experiment in writing, as none of the poems is ascribed to either author.

Ackland and Warner supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, and Ackland criticised the British government for its indifference to the "sufferings of the Spanish people at the grass-roots level" in her poem "Instructions from England, 1936".

"Note nothing of why or how, enquire no deeper than you need into what set these veins on fire, Note simply that they bleed."

After World War II, Ackland turned her attention to confessional poetry and a memoir concerning her relationship with Warner and its many emotional issues as Ackland pursued involvements with other women.

At first, Warner was tolerant of her younger lover's dalliances, but the seriousness and length of Ackland's relationship with Elizabeth Wade White was distressing to Warner and pushed her relationship with Ackland to The Edge.

Ackland's distresses at loving two women simultaneously and of endeavouring 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.

They were taken up with the party's participation in the II International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, held in Valencia between 4 and 17 July 1937, within the framework of the Spanish Civil War as well as numerous socialist and pacifist activities.

In 1937, Ackland and Warner moved from rural Dorset to a house near Dorchester.

Both became involved with Communist ideals and issues, with Ackland writing a column "Country Dealings" concerning rural poverty for the Daily Worker and the Left Review.

In 1950 and 1951 they rented Great Eye Folly at Salthouse, where Warner wrote her final novel, The Flint Anchor (published 1954).

Warner was twelve years older than Ackland, and the two lived together until Ackland's death from breast cancer in 1969.

Indeed, much of her poetry was published posthumously, and she received little attention from critics until a revival of interest in her work in the 1970s.

Warner outlived Ackland by nine years, dying in 1978.