Search Results

“... cathedral towns of England calling themselves Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot. But when, in 1930, she heard Valentine Ackland wailing through a bedroom wall that she felt unloved, Warner bounded through the door and never again went to bed with a man. Valentine Ackland was 24, with an Eton crop and a ruffled past. At 16 she ...”

“... and digging), to hear music, and to live in the country with the human being she loved best, Valentine Ackland. The two women settled in one cottage after another, and finally at Frome Vauchurch, in Dorset. What happened to them? That was left in their letters, journals and poems for the world to understand. In 1935 they became 1935-ish members of ...”

“... On 2​ January 1931, Valentine Ackland sent her new lover, Sylvia Townsend Warner, a book about bisexuality. ‘After reading it carefully,’ she reported with evident relief, ‘I discover that you and I are admirably suited to each other.’ Warner was quick to imagine bisexuality as a kind of physiological oscillation ...”

“... Shell Museum, the Little Auk, Gilbert White, sea fishing, the Elephant Man, Edwardian Sheringham, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, embroidery technique, Edward Meyerstein, Walt Disney, the Norfolk Giant, the pituitary gland, diabetes, MI5, and Einstein, who stayed at a (not very) ‘secret location’ on Roughton Heath, near Cromer, for some ...”

“... a rare and admirable person. Many pages of the diaries now published are about her love for Valentine Ackland, the woman with whom she lived for forty years. She had in youth a long, unimpassioned affair with an eminent married musician, whom she gave up when Ackland appeared. They had their ups and downs, of ...”

“... the symbolist nostalgia of Mary Butts, the Marxist version of village life offered by lesbians Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the Luddite organicism of Rolf Gardiner and the yeoman-patriotic creed of Sir Arthur Bryant (both the latter having shady pro-Nazi backgrounds). These idealists were all anti-MoD in a general way: but because ...”