Valentine Ackland

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 critical analysis is Wendy Mulford's book, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics, 1930–1951, Pandora, London, 1988. With regard to her self-reflection as a poet, Ackland exhibits themes and explorations similar to poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Of interest, too, is Ackland's explorations of the personal effects 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, Mulford 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 — although not in artistic achievement — with metaphysical poets such as John Donne and Philip Larkin in the effort to see personal experience from multiple perspectives while never fully resting with one perspective or another.

A contemporary examination of Ackland's poetry was published by Carcanet Press in 2008, titled Journey from Winter: Selected Poems. The volume is edited by Frances Bingham, who also provides a contextual and critical introduction.

Works: monographs Whether a Dove or a Seagull; poems by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland; New York: Viking, 1933, and London: Chatto & Windus, 1934. The entire text is reprinted in Journey from Winter: Selected Poems (2008) Country Conditions, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936; a contemporary study of rural conditions in Dorset first appearing as three articles in the Left Review; March, May and September 1935 Twenty-Eight Poems by Valentine Ackland, privately printed by Clare, Son & Co, Wells, n.d. Later Poems by Valentine Ackland, privately printed by Clare, Son & Co, Wells, n.d. The Nature of the Moment, London: Chatto & Windus, 1973, and New York: New Directions, 1973 Further Poems of Valentine Ackland, Beckenham: Welmont Publishing, 1978 For Sylvia: An Honest Account, Methuen, London, 1986 and Norton, New York, 1986 (foreword by Bea Howe); a memoir written in 1949 concerning Ackland's early life, i.e., before meeting STW; her family, first loves and the beginnings of her alcoholism and the various attempts to cure it I'll Stand by You: Selected Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland with Narrative by Sylvia Townsend Warner, ed. Susanna Pinney, London: Pimlico, 1988 Journey from Winter: Selected Poems, edited with introductions by Frances Bingham, Manchester: Carcanet, 2008

Works: periodical and anthologized publications "Poor Shelter" (poem) - Time & Tide, 30 August 1930 "Two Occasions" (stories) 1. After Good Friday 2. Morning Visit - London Mercury, February 1936 A review of three books – Reporter in Spain, Frank Pitcairn; Spanish Front, Carlos Prieto; A Preliminary Official Report on the Atrocities in Southern Spain, issued by The National Government at Burgos - Left Review, December 1936 "The Spanish Struggle" (book review of Behind the Spanish Barricades, John Langdon-Davies; Spain in Revolt, Gannes and Repard; Spain Today, Conze) - Left Review, January 1937 "Weymouth Manoeuvres, 1936" (poem) - Life and Letters Today, Spring 1937 “Two Pictures of the Spanish War” (book review of The War in Spain by Ramon Sender, and The Spanish Cockpit by Franz Borkenau) – Left Review, September 1937 “On a Summer's Day” (story) – Lilliput, October 1940 "Greek, the World's Tongue" (poem) - The New Yorker, 10 May 1941 (collected in TNOTM) "Teaching to Shoot" (poem) - The New Yorker, 27 February 1943 (collected in JFW) "Month of Liberation" (poem) - Our Time, May 1946 “Recent Novels” (book review of Death Into Life, Olaf Stapledon; In Search of Stephen Vane, B. Ifor Evans; New Short Stories, 1945-6, John Singer, ed.; The Shoes Men Walk In, David Martin; You Forget So Quickly, Ashley Smith; Of Our Time, James Gordon) – Our Time, November 1946 "Whinbury Camp" (poem) - West Country Magazine, Autumn 1946 “A Multitude of the Heavenly Host” (story) – The Pleasure Ground : A Miscellany of English Writing, London: MacDonald & Co., 1947 “Interviewing Miss Levison” (story) – Lilliput, February 1947 “Sunlight on the Camp” (story) – Life and Letters (continuing The London Mercury), April 1947 “When I was in Basle” (story) – Life and Letters, June 1947 "Last Cockcrow" (poem) - The New Yorker, 20 March 1948 (uncollected) “New Novels” (book review of Emily, James Hanley; The Last Frontier, Howard Fast; Men of Forty-Eight, Jack Lindsay; The Forgotten World, William Goldman) – Our Time, September 1948 “Waitress! Waitress!” (story) – Lilliput, July 1948 (also in The Bedside Lilliput, London: Hulton Press, 1951) “A Ghost was Born” (story) – Lilliput, October 1948 “Granny Moxon” (essay) – The Countryman, Winter 1949 “The Village Witch” (essay) – The West Country Magazine, 1949 "The Flame of the Candle" (story) - The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 2019:1 - first published ca. 1950 in Housewife “Dotty Detty” (essay) – The West Country Magazine, Autumn 1950 “The First and the Last” (story) – The Countryman, Summer 1950 "The Lesson" (poem) - The Countryman, Summer 1952 “Winter of Content” (story) – The Countryman, Winter 1952 “The Man in the Balloon” (story) – The New Statesman and Nation, July 24, 1954 - later in The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 2019:1 "A City Set on a Hill" (poem) - The Countryman, Summer 1954 “Urn Burial” (story) – The Berkley Book of Modern Writing, No. 3, New York: Berkley Publishing Corp., 1956 (In This Narrow Place, Mulford notes this story first appeared in Modern Writing 1953 (eds P. Rahv and N. Philips). On pages 217–23 of TNP, she writes about this story, which seems to reflect Valentine's and Sylvia's disastrous visit to Connecticut in 1939.) "Lean with your Sight" (poem) - Peninsula: an Anthology of Verse from the West Country (London: Macdonald, 1957) “Cat Characteristics” (essay) – The Countryman, Winter 1958 "The Rose That Never Killed" (poem) - The Bryanston Miscellany Bryanston School, 1958 "All Soul's Night" (poem) - The Countryman, Autumn 1959 "The most persuasive argument is there," (poem) - Aylesford Review, Winter 1962–63 "March" (poem) - The Countryman, Spring 1964 “Solomon Caesar Malan” (biographical essay) – Dorset Worthies 11 – Dorset Natural and Archaeological Society, 1962 – 1969 "Into this brief and angry place" and "Reflections at the Telephone" (poems) - Genesis : Grasp, 1/3, 1969 "Thomas the Cat" (essay) - n.d. - Newsletter 39 of The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society "Through a Glass Brightly" (sketch) - n.d. - Newsletter 39 of The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society "The Story of Captain Pompey" (children's story) - n.d. - Newsletter 39 of The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society

Critical studies Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics, 1930-1951, London: Pandora, 1988 Frances Bingham, editor, Journey from Winter: Selected Poems [by Valentine Ackland], Manchester: Carcanet, 2008 Ailsa Granne, "Fantasy, Writing and Relationship in the Texts of Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner", Literature Compass, volume 11, issue 12, December 2014 Peter Haring Judd, The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White, Reading; Handheld Press, 2018 (self-published in 2013) Peter Haring Judd & Ailsa Granne, "The End of the Affair: A Correspondence between Valentine Acklan and Elizabeth Wade White", Journal of The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 2019:1 Ailsa Granne, Life-writing, Genre and Criticism in the Texts of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Women Writing for Women, New York and London: Routledge, 2020 (reviewed by Janet Montefiore in The Journal of the Sylvia Towndsend Warner Society, 2023) David Trotter, "Posthuman? Animal Corpses, Aeroplanes and Very High Frequencies in the Work of Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner", Journal of The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 2020:1 Frances Bingham, Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life, Bath: Handheld Press, 2021