 Welcome to another cultural event from the British Library. My name is Jonah Albert, and I am one of the library's cultural events producers. Tonight, our special guest is Frances Bingham. She talks on the life of Valentine Ackland, a lifelong gender rebel based on her new book, Valentine Ackland, A Transgressive Life. But before we say hello to Frances proper, I do have some housekeeping for you. If you would like to buy a copy of the book, please look out for a link in the chat. Towards the end of her talk, Frances will be taking questions. Please submit your questions using the Q&A button, the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. After the event, a survey form will pop up. We would be really grateful to you if you could take some time to fill that out. Your feedback on our events program enables us to program the kinds of events that you would like to see. And now let's meet Frances. Frances Bingham is a freelance writer, poet and playwright. She has published short stories and poems in anthologies and magazines and read her work at numerous literary festivals, as well as contributing to events such as the South Bank Centre's Literature and Spoken Word program. We are delighted that she is part of the British Library's Cultural Events program. Please welcome Frances Bingham. Thanks. Thank you, Jonah. And hello everybody and thank you for joining us this evening. And it's part of the celebration of Pride Month. We are going to explore some of the transgressive elements of Valentine's life, particularly her gender identity at the price she paid for living openly as herself. As readers, we can often remember the moment when a voice hails us off the page and we recognise for the first time an unknown writer who has something to say to us personally, something we need to hear. That was my experience when I first read a poem by Valentine Atland, a little-known 20th century poet whose voice immediately intrigued me with its unique intensity and lyricism. So what was this voice like? Obviously, the best way to hear Valentine is to let her speak for herself. And so I'm going to begin by reading this poem which is classic Valentine, addressing the reader directly, placing the wild, strange poet in the centre of the poem and exhorting us to read her anti-history in a particular way. When you look at me after I have died, I'd note the tidy hair, the sleeping head, closed eyes and quiet hands. Do not decide too readily that I was so. Instead, look at your own heart while you may and see how wild and strange a wild, alive man is. And so remember me. The choice of the word man seems more than the convention of the period as used to mean human being or person. There's also a phantasmagorical male in that last line which stops short of saying the poet actually is a man but requests us to remember her like one. That was one of the few things I knew about Valentine Actland when I first heard this voice that she wore men's clothes and was the lover of Sylvia Tansen Warner, the remarkable writer. As I discovered more about Valentine, I realized that her gender non-conformism was central to her identity as a poet and indeed as a person informing her political activism and her perception of herself as a queer witness and speaker for the silence. Now, if I can find it, I'm gonna have to ask you to come and help me. I think, I've done it. Okay, this is the cover image of my biography, Portrait of Valentine in the late 1920s by Eric Gill, looking very androgynous and very queer, I think. Valentine records that as a child, people commented that she was a very queer girl, really. Spell, Q, U, A, I, R. And by the time she wrote that, Valentine was probably aware of the sense in which the word meant not only an outsider but specifically a sexual outsider, a transgressor against societal norms. And she thought it was amusing that her queerness was being talked about even then. Resistance to traditional gender roles was instilled in Valentine paradoxically by her father's treatment of her as a child. Here's the family in their car with five-year-old Valentine then called Molly at the wheel, her sister Joan and her mother Ruth, her father Robert standing beside it, and the nanny she labelled on the back of the picture, my awful nurse. They were well off with a house in Mayfair where she was born in 1906 and another in Norfolk. There were no Atlant sons and although Molly Valentine was given a typically limited girls education in London, she was also allowed an unusual amount of freedom on the Norfolk coast where she learnt to drive, shoot and box as well as the less gendered pursuits of riding, swimming and fishing. Here she wrote, the London child became a privately adventurous, ageless and sexless being. But she was known locally as the young master or his lordship because of her resemblance to her father. This is Molly dressed for riding age nine, which gives an idea of what they meant. Booted and suited in a child's riding gear, she looks as Valentine described herself in her boyhood. Despite this privileged background, she was also deprived, brought up by the tyrannical nanny who sometimes neglected the child and left her hungry or cold experiences which gave Valentine a lifelong empathy with the weak and suffering. She was also bullied by her sister in an abusive relationship, which was permanently damaging. Joan was a hard, hard scourge on the back of a child. Valentine wrote later, I bear the mark still and I always shall. Her solace was in reading and believing that she might be a poet one day. These childish daydreams didn't take into account that as a woman of her class, she was destined to be a debutante and make a suitable marriage. This is a young pre-Valentine Molly as a debutante, perhaps her engagement photo, already a striking young woman before the eaten crop which transforms her in the gill drawing on the book cover into a drag nefertiti. Also, she had apparently no idea that her father's love was absolutely conditional on her acceptable behavior. At finishing school in Paris aged 15, she began an affair with another girl, Lana. And as she wrote later, that less than month in the spring of 1922, controlled the whole course of my life. The young Valentine to be discovered her sexual identity all at once. She wrote, when I lay down in love, I was instantly released into my own whole self. I knew that I possessed myself as well as because of possessing her. When her father found out about the affair after her sister stole their love letters and showed them to him, he acted as though he too knew that this was his daughter's innate sexual identity in action, not a passing phase or schoolgirl crush. There were terrible scenes which scarred Valentine for the rest of her life. And an extraordinary clash of wills, her father insisting that she'd committed the worst, filthiest, most unforgivable thing that anyone could do. While she declared that they had fallen in love and there was nothing sinful or unnatural about that. It was the first time she'd ever defied her father but as she wrote of her courage afterwards, he did not know that I had the poets to protect me. Her refusal to submit had immensely damaging consequences although it was the first step towards her ultimate liberation. The two young lovers were separated and Lana was summarily married off to a cousin she disliked and feared. Robert never spoke to his daughter again and she was sent away from home in disgrace and allowed no contact with her old life. When he died a year later, they were still unreconciled and during his last illness, he refused to see her. Valentine wrote later that he'd never forgiven her, that he died not loving but hating me and that what he hated was an essential part of me. This was the first time in Valentine's life that she understood the cost of being herself and admitting that her sexuality was an essential part of that self. Yet only a few years later, she could write in her diary, of course I'm a lesbian with a capital L, exclamation mark. Although she had refused to admit to her father that she'd done anything wrong, it's perhaps not surprising that after his death, she tried to conform to traditional expectations and take the time-honoured way of escaping family control by marrying, despite being committed to a serious affair with a woman, Beau Foster. It is Beau, 10 years older than Valentine, a sociable, cheerful woman who converts her to Colossism and Richard Turpin, who was briefly the husband and also became Catholic equally briefly. With Beau, Valentine hoped for an openly acknowledged romantic partnership, but Beau is discreet and extremely cautious, although Valentine always remembered that Beau made love very well indeed. However, there was no prospect of a life together, so Valentine married Richard in Westminster Cathedral, just like the Prime Minister. Predictably, this heterosexual interlude was a disaster. The marriage lasted less than six months and ended in annulment. Richard also had a lover, another man, and hoped that marriage would cure him, but he'd chosen very much the wrong wife to help with such a project. Valentine said she was physically revolted by him and desperately fought against his insistence on his rights as master of everything, of me. Eventually, she underwent an operation to remove her hymen, which was supposed to be the problem which had kept the marriage unconsummated. This was another savage punishment for non-compliance. The sexual incompatibility of the couple was presented as her fault and this medical intervention could be interpreted as a symbolic penetration by proxy on her incapable husband's behalf. The unusual operation might have had the effect of forcing her into compliance and gender-appropriate behavior, but in fact, it sent her in the opposite direction towards the discovery of her transgressive identity. As she'd married at 19, Valentine was still very young when her wedding was annulled, but her status as a married, if divorced woman ironically allowed her the independence to live away from the family home, dress as she hiked, experiment with her sexuality and begin to create a new identity as we see here. During the late 1920s, Valentine lived alone in a studio in Bloomsbury. Her poetry was published in magazines. She modeled for artists like Eric Gill and Augustus John and had affairs with Nancy Cunard, the film star Anna Mae Wong and the gallery owner Dorothy Warren, among many others, although she was still involved with both. These photos show Valentine around about this time on a skiing on the boat posing for her lover's camera, fashionably androgynous in her sportswear and tie. She returned to her family name, Ackland, and took the first name, Valentine. This was the name she would always be known by. It was ungendered and usually presumed to be male and suited her new identity under construction. It sounded like a poet's name, she thought, and made a reference to her self-proclaimed status as a lover whose patron saint and her namesake is the high priest of love. Why don't more people change their Christian names, she once asked. It would not have been possible to have lived for so long if I'd been called Molly, now would it? Valentine also took to dressing in male clothes. Trousers, which she claimed were unheard of then, except among perverts, with a man's shirt and tie. This was intended to be a proclamation of an openly lesbian sexual identity. Valentine wrote that she wished lesbians could wear a distinctive dress as men do, and trousers were the closest thing she could find to such a uniform within the binary code of contemporary dress. Valentine's trousers symbolized her new freedom, not only the literal ability to stride out or run, but liberation from the invisible limits set on women's lives and rejection of traditional female roles. As she was nearly six feet tall, Valentine could pass as a man easily and often did so, though she didn't seek to. Once when she was at a tea party in the village of Choldon, hosted by the writer Theodore Poes, another visitor indicated to her and asked, is this your eldest son, Mr. Poes? And Theodore could only mumble, no, and nobody enlightened the guest any further. In this dorset village, there was a rumour that Valentine was really a young man, which she did nothing to discourage. This is one of the most frequently reproduced images of Valentine in acting her masculinity with panache, phallic gun flourished, and an amused and challenging gaze. Cross-stressing signified that Valentine had taken on the male prerogative of loving women, that she was her father's true heir, even while inhabiting the role, which had made him disown her. It also claimed the sexual potency her husband had lacked and perhaps satirized his self-presentation as a gentleman. In her trousers, Valentine challenged the social order of masculine privilege. She usurped male prerogatives of all kinds and reveled in the disruption her defiance caused. Yet again, this defiance would be damaging as well as liberating. One of the privileged male roles she'd always claimed was as the poet writing love poems specifically to women, not as an anonymous author gendered he according to period usage, but audaciously as herself. And she wrote more poems to Sylvia Townsend Warner than anyone else. Valentine and Sylvia began their lifelong relationship in 1930 after a courtship in Chalden and London, based on poetry and a shared dislike of conventional morality. Sylvia was 12 years older, already an established author and a modern woman of sophistication, wit, and unnerving intellect. This is her a little later, flooding the river outside their house in Froomevale Church during the 1940s. It's my favorite image of Sylvia, not looking as poised as in the famous Cecil Beaton or how it cost her all the photos, but so vigorous and idiosyncratic, her skirts hitched up and her cigarette hanging out of her mouth. They first met at one of these poets' afternoons. Valentine was invited to come to tea and meet a poet, but on that occasion, she did not enjoy Sylvia's forceful personality and tornado of talk. Sylvia in turn was startled by Valentine's scent, looks, and disapproving silence. It wasn't evidently a great success. But the poetry gradually brought them together. Sylvia wooed Valentine with compliments and cookery and a genuine admiration of her poetry. Valentine responded with poems about reading Sylvia's work. I was aware of your words, my heart intent, a stir to them, my heart was a quickened lover. And a promise to look after Sylvia's new cottage in Choldon while she was away in London. But before Sylvia left for the winter, they shared the cottage for a week in separate bedrooms and one windy night with the owls hooting and the inside creaking outside, Valentine told Sylvia that she felt utterly loveless. It was the cue Sylvia needed. She took Valentine in her arms and told her how much she was loved. So that last became lovers. And Valentine wrote, I did not know that such joy could be found or ever be guiled to stay. Less than three months later in London, they exchanged wedding rings. The morning after a Mozart concert at which Sylvia had told Valentine, I look to all those people and I only wanted you. Which Valentine took as she intended as a romantic declaration of permanent and absolute commitment. Their passionate relationship survived until Valentine's death, almost 40 years later, despite much turbulence, even Valentine's unhappy affair with the American Elizabeth Wade White and a temporary reconversion to socialism, which I can only mention briefly here, but our detailed in the biography along with much else. As Sylvia wrote to her during a difficult time, we are each other's element. This shows the two of them together, taken in the mirror by Valentine when they were living at Frankfurt Manor in Norfolk in 1933 to four. That kind of paradise where we were so happy. It shows Valentine's height, even though she's bending over the box camera. And the way Sylvia is looking at her rather than at their reflection seems very typical. In 1934, they published a joint poetry book, Whether a Dival Seagull. The poems were not assigned to either author, which was intended to be equalizing, but had the unintentional effect of creating a literary guessing game. The book contains an exchange of love poems between the two women, as well as many other poems on other themes. And it seems remarkable, but so respectable a firm as Chateau and Winders, she would publish them only five years after the Well of Loneliness obscenity trial, as some of the poems contain far more explicit lines than that night they were not divided. But presumably the publisher relied on poetry being treated like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which famously escaped prosecution in the same year as Radcliffe Hall's far less daring book. Let's hear Valentine's transgressive voice again in one of these 1930s erotic poems, very of its time unmistakably heard. The eyes of body being blindfolded by night, refer to the eyes of mind, at brain's command, study imagination's map, then order out a hand to journey forth as deputy for sight. Thus and by these ordered ways, I come at you, hand deft and delicate, to trace the swathly laid and intricate root of your body's maze. My hand, being deft and delicate, displays unerring judgment, cleaves between your thighs, clean as a redirected airplane flies. Thus I, within these strictly ordered ways, although blindfolded, seize with more than sight, your moonlit meadows and your shadowed night. This poem I had to read on women's hour, when I'd been expecting to read one of Valentine's anti-war poems, and it seemed rather unsuitable for BBC Radio 4 so long before the water shared, if ever. But let's hope we can get away with it in the British Library. There was a cost to this too. Although most critics appeared not to notice the writer's gender and determinedly named them Mr. Atland and Miss Warner. So public acknowledgement was avoided. The attentive reader could hardly fail to realise what kind of love affair was being described. And in private, the reaction was not positive. Robert Frost, to whom the book was dedicated, told a friend that he was disgusted by the more physical poems in the book, which made him feel chilled to the marrow as in the actual presence of some foul form of death. Valentine never published another major book of poems during her lifetime. And there seems little doubt that her reputation was damaged, not only by the convenient joint publication with her older and more famous lover, but also by her overt portrayal of lesbian sexuality, which so discomforted the male poetry establishment. Another of Valentine's attributes which was considered stereotypically male at the time was the ability to drive, according to Sylvia, like God. They had an MG sports car, and in 1935, Valentine offered to drive it on Communist Party business in her newfound enthusiasm for the cause. MI5 intercepted her letter and presumed from the name and car that she was a man. After much confusion, including the mistaken impression that Townesend and Warner were two different people, the hilariously inept investigation revealed that Sylvia was one person and Valentine was the woman. The next question was whether either of them appears to be in any way abnormal. The inquiry was presumably prompted by the fact that they were two women living together and that one of them had been mistaken for a man. These suspicions were confirmed by a report which detailed Valentine's MG sports car, her rifle for shooting rabbits, and the fact that she more often than not wears male clothing in preference to female attire. There was in fact no evidence of subversive activity. Valentine's motivation for joining the Communist Party was in common with many other left-wing intellectuals of the period, a combination of anti-fascism and a concern for the suffering of the workers during the Depression. Living in Choldon, she and Sylvia witnessed the extreme poverty of rural workers, shepherds, farmhands, who were their neighbors, and especially of the women who struggled to keep families fed and shod and warm despite inadequate housing. The wealth inequalities she saw convinced Valentine that change was essential, a social revolution. And the articles she wrote about if the daily worker were published in a book, Country Conditions, which exposed the problems and demanded action. Valentine and Sylvia were under covert surveillance from now on, unsurprisingly perhaps when they volunteered during the Spanish Civil War, working for British medical aid in Barcelona, and later as delegates to a writer's anti-fascist conference. This photo shows them in Spain with their comrade, Assoncion. Valentine's Red Cross armband is just visible, and they were wearing party badges. Valentine's smoking a cigar. And I was told by someone who knew her that the hand-on forehead gesture, shading her eyes is very characteristic. Valentine had originally hoped to enlist as a competent when early in the war, there were female fighters, Miliciana, but she had to be content with ambulance driving and more mundane tasks, not without their dangers. They experienced love for bombing raids, visited besieged Madrid under bombardment and toured the front lines and were deeply moved by the greeting, Viva Los Intellectuales, with which they were hailed wherever they went, as Sylvia observed, a strange sentiment to English ears. But even here, there was a level of prejudice against them, both as women and particularly as a lesbian couple. Stephen Spender, who was a fellow anti-fascist delegate, caricatured Valentine in his memoirs as the poetess addressing her lady novelist companion as comrade darling and being humorous and superior, apparently completely oblivious of his own ditto ditto and ditto-ness. This attitude was widespread to judge by Spender's confidence in the success of his satire, but its presumptions are undermined by both writers amusing those serious and relatively unpatronizing accounts of their time in Spain. Something of Valentine's idealism is captured by Sylvia's memory of her impetuous chivalry, her most glorious days, our highest demonstration of love spreading out to our fellows. Back home in Dorset, Valentine remained deeply involved with the struggle in Spain as this short atmospheric poem, Badarse to Children, August 1936, expresses, telephone wires cry in the wind and make song there. I stand in the misty night and listen. Hear voices from a far distance. Hear sounds from further outside the wires than ever inside. Hear sounds from Spain. The mist muffles all but these, blankets perhaps the reply, but the wind plays the wires still and the wires cry. During World War II, the MI5 investigation continued. Valentine was barred from war work except for routine clerical jobs and her employers were warned of her communist sympathies. She was in effect blacklisted as was Sylvia, although interestingly, MI5's objections to Sylvia lecturing to the troops as though she might start a mutiny were overruled. When Valentine discovered that the mysterious codes she'd been set to type out were in fact knitting patterns, she was able to laugh at herself, but this was a bizarre use for her skills. Her sister Joan, photographed here in uniform during the war, had a high-ranking job with the Red Hot Cross and was awarded the MBE for her war work. The irony of this can't have helped Valentine in her wartime struggle with alcoholism, which she recounts in the published memoir for Sylvia, a guilt-ridden confession of unhappy addictions and affairs. Also, Valentine was aware that the Nazis were exterminating people like me. She knew that the poet Lorca had been murdered in Spain because he was homosexual, as well as for his communist politics. And she was afraid that in Britain, the war would bring tyrannical insistence upon absolute obedience and conformity, a dissent yet again into darkness. The prospect of enforced conformity was a frightening one for somebody so visibly non-conformist, but not as terrifying as that of a Nazi victory. Valentine and Sylvia's war effort was sincere, for personal as well as patriotic reasons. They volunteered as night firewatchers, walking the lanes and making owl calls on their whistles as van driver and navigator delivering chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers in remote postings along the Dorset Coast. They also enrolled in an unofficial women's home guard with rifle practice in the orchard, which Valentine immortalized in the poem, teaching to shoot. When we were first together as lover and beloved, we had nothing to learn. Together we improved on all the world's wide learning and bettered it and loved. Now you stand on the summer lawn and I'm to show you first how to raise gun to shoulder, bow head, stare quickly and fire. Then how to struggle with the clumsy bolt outdated, withdrawal, return and again, fire. As the evening darkens, even this summer evening and the trees bend down under the night wind and the leaves rush in a flaming fire, I am to show you how to bend your body, take step lightly and I hold your arm, thin and sleek and cool as a willow wand fresh in my hand. And in your hand, you clasp fervently this dirty lump, this grenade. The thing you hold as you once held my hand is ready to kill. We intended to finish those who would finish us. We who are not ill are not old, are not mad. We who have been young and who still have reason to live knowing that all is not told. In your hand, you hold iron and iron is too old and steel, which breaks and shatters and is cold. And our hands are together as always and know well what they hold. This blameless if unheroic all record did nothing to change their dangerous reputation. Even during the 1950s, MI5 continued to monitor these two women who in the past have been of particular interest to us. Noted the suspicious fact, both persons are great readers and possessed some literature appertaining to socialism. Indeed, the fire on Valentine was still open when she died in 1969, although she long ceased to be a member of the Communist Party. This long running persecution had obviously had an impact on her official reputation, her employment prospects, and of course her privacy and personal freedom. It was a surreal situation in which reading, writing, any kind of left wing sympathies and abnormality, which included sexual difference and gender non-conformism under one convenient label were all treated as serious threats to national security. Blacklisting was only one of the consequences of Valentine's gender deviance, which must be counted as dangerous costs, although we can't quantify them exactly. Throughout her life, this pattern of discrimination is discernible from her sister's abusive bullying, which discovered and tormented Valentine's quareness very early. To the scandal over her sexuality, culminating in her father's violent rejection and her disgrace, the subsequent trauma of her marriage and her struggle for the independence to become Valentine. Then there was her bitter disappointment after the publication of Weather a Dove or Seagull and the subsequent marginalizing of her poetry. She also faced more subtle forms of prejudice and disapproval. Her gender identity was sometimes ridiculed, sometimes she was ignored, or as the more visible lesbian of the couple was in a sense blamed for their sexuality and treated as Sylvia's nameless lesbian companion. These experiences surely contributed to Valentine's alcoholism and recurrent depression, her extreme guilt and troubled psyche. However, Valentine definitely had no regrets about her visible gender deviance. She also found her greatest happiness from the same source, the life story which Valentine told and retold, perhaps with the narrative compulsion of the trauma survivor in an attempt to reclaim and own her experiences, describes many of the great joys she felt as well as the problems she encountered. Despite the suffering, she claimed to have lived a life of rapture, ecstasy and intense delight. And shortly before her death, she wrote, no one has had a more blessed life than I. So far from being unhappy about her gender identity, in fact, it's clear from Valentine's writing that she and Sylvia were proud of their relationship, called themselves lesbians with a capital L and enjoyed Valentine's gender transgression, a form of self-expression, trespass, parody and protest all at once. When Valentine heard that Sylvia described her as a charming woman, she wrote, it is such a strange kind of shock to be reminded that one can appear as a charming or any other kind of woman. Nothing could be more remote from what I feel myself to be. And what do I feel myself to be? Simply myself. Why does this transgressive voice speak to us today? What does Valentine have to tell us? Firstly, although Valentine certainly isn't an ideal role model, she is undoubtedly a full bear, a pioneer gender transgressive whose passionate determination to live as her true self is genuinely inspiring. And her ease with her own identity, her acceptance that she wasn't a gender conformist woman, but that that didn't make her a man either, reminds us that gender is not a binary choice with two possible options, but a subtle and infinitely adjustable continuum, where to reject one traditional gender role doesn't necessarily mean having to accept the other. Visible lesbians like Valentine helped shape this wider acceptance of diversity, where it exists, by their refusal to compromise and determination to claim their gender identity and express it freely. But I think it's important to remember that there was a price to be paid in terms of societal exclusion at the very least, and that the awareness of this was part of Valentine's determination to oppose prejudice and discrimination in all their many forms, through her work as well as her life. So an important aspect of this voice is that it shares with us a queer perspective, a version of the past, which makes it far more gender diverse and differently peopled than the conventional picture. This may be one reason why, as a poet, Valentine always placed herself within the poem as the queer figure in the landscape, or the cityscape, as when she wrote of walking in Mecklenborough Square in trousers during the 1920s. In her work, as in her life, Valentine is unavoidably there, disrupting the norm by her very existence. But, as Sylvia wrote, this presence goes beyond mere statements of self to a commitment to capturing truth and the moment. This modernist trophy, the nature of the moment, as the key to individual consciousness, reminds us that one of the purposes of these poems is to evoke separate unique experiences and communicate them, creating the recognition of universality, common ground among all human beings. No doubt, this is one of the reasons her writing has inspired other artists, composers, and writers. Her poems have been set to music by Paul Nordhoff and Gerald Finsey. She encouraged many poets, including Ursula Vaughan-Williams and Mary Casey, and also had a large collection of contemporary poetry books, the best kind of support for other poets actually buying their work, which she bequeathed to the National Poetry Library. This photo shows the book plate commissioned from Reynolds Stone with an installation at the NPL, which includes some of the books. It was part of an artist's residency there by lettering artist and studio potter Liz Matthews, based on the bequest and Valentine's own poetry. And to conclude, we're going to see some photos of these works now, in relation to particular poems, which manifest Valentine's voice in specific ways. It's very appropriate for this event, as several of Liz's artist books are in the British Library's permanent collection, including one which is currently on exhibition in the Treasures Gallery in the art of the book display, and it is now possible to visit that glorious gallery again. This is also very kindly helping me with the photos and screen work this evening. Just as Valentine found encouragement and solace from the poets of the past, she called her friends and protectors. So her voice can do the same for us in certain ways. The poem Journey from Winter, which gave the title to my edition of Valentine's Actions Selected Poems, powerfully evokes the journey through life and beyond it, in a particularly modernist style of mysterious pilgrimage. As days become shorter and the cold ghost of the north leans across from the pole to strike us and winter appears in the sky, it is time to consider our journey. Take down the guides, the schedules of trains and of sailings, the smart list of planes, and here by the first fire, our comfort and warning, consider. The ways of coming at truth, attaining, creating or rediscovering, need no special equipment of faith or unfaith. The amateur party about to set out tomorrow will follow one route of the three, but all run together, somewhere in country uncharted and all reach the end. There are no true maps of the kingdom. Guides have been and returned, but some will not venture again, while others will shepherd partway and still others travel as exiles working a passage home. The natives are foreign to us and will often own kindness, being without interest in strangers and unable to speak our tongue. They say the first stages are easy, civilized travel and pleasant companions on route. But once over the frontier, there's nothing to help you except your own wits and the wish to reach your objective. Once over the frontier, the others who started out with you scatter and each one travels alone. Guidebooks agree that the country is full of silence, no written words to be found, no signposts, no place names, no roads and scarcely a living man met. All you can do is watch for the flight of birds or study the slant of the stars or try to decipher the hieroglyphs drawn by sheep on the hills. You can live on the country, they say and do better so than to carry provisions which under that sky will rot. You can travel fast or slow. There is nothing to tell you how much further you have to journey until you arrive, how much further until you reach, reach what? I do not know. All I know is the blight of the North wind, the carrion, patience of winter hanging up there in the sky and the blow that is aimed from the pole that is aimed to destroy us. These things and the date of starting are all I know. How weird that is. It's so of its time, the machine age with the inevitable mention of planes obviously influenced by Orden yet also revelatory of the unique landscape of Valentine's Psyche, a map of her mind. By Grace of Water is one of the poems she wrote about living beside the river Froome relating her emotional experience to the natural world in true romantic modern fashion exploring the landscape Psyche through the symbolism of her surroundings. Everywhere is the pattern of water even in tears, the pattern of water. Water lies ready to hand, ready to cleanse, ready to bless. Water weeps for us when we cannot weep in the youth of the year and towards the year's end. The skies pour out their sorrow for us and our days and steadily, steadily down flow the rivers bearing our trouble away to the mothering sea. This deceptively simple poem reminds me a little of Kathleen Reigns' spell against sorrow with its lines stream wash away, wash away sorrow. And Valentine's reference to our trouble seems to link the poet's own particular difficulties with the whole human condition and the solace we find in nature. Even the poems about her quest for spiritual enlightenment usually have a pastoral setting and Valentine is always present and visible as in this statement of belief. Every autumn a wind like this wind blows and over the secret dark outside the window goes. Every autumn comes one such night as this when I sit within doors and listen and remember how there is each year on one night, just such wind as this. And love wells within me and spills over the world because of the unknown dark and the great banners unfold out there beyond me, that beyond which folds about us warm as life and is our life and holds our days and deaths and births within its sheltering folds. Again, this is describing a moment, a recurring experience linked to the seasons and weather yet unfurling into a metaphysical universe beyond time. As a queer witness to the 20th century, Valentine engaged with the political issues of her time, writing prescient laments for the destruction of the natural world as well as the plight of refugees or political prisoners and anti-war protests like this extraordinary requiem for the civilian dead of World War II. Who was overthrown? Do you remember who lies under that stone? London was heaped with the weeping litter, overgrown with the weeds of sweet and bitter. But who lies beneath them is not known. The remains are known. Rome and Paris and Berlin and Warsaw, Leningrad, Hiroshima, Vienna, Belgrade, Amsterdam, Stalingrad, Dresden and Rotterdam. Count on your fingers and count on your toes. Run through the abacus with an accomplished touch. On the electric calculator, tick off the cities. I am a citizen of these cities, lying beneath the weed-grown stones. All the future must be built on my bones. And these speaking dead are international from all sides of the conflict. There's a connection, of course, with Valentine's own experience of warfare and a powerful reminder of the inevitable connection between past and present, the shadow of history. The love poems which Valentine wrote all her life are an incalculable contribution to this understanding of universal human emotion through the particular experience of lesbian love, unless you haven't rubbed frost, of course. This poem is one which Valentine wrote only a few years before her death, meditation on love in age, which she called a not-poem about love. I kneel at your feet, I kiss your hands, I am your lover. I love you more than water, more than I love the swans cruising along the river beside our house. More than I love the summers, the abundant years. If it is hard to grow old, if the ruthless, unpitying mirror, thrusts at us unfamiliar, even alien faces, so that we stare, are afraid, believe ourselves lost to ourselves, to each other and separated forever. Let us not fear, my darling. Let us look at each other, not regarding the lying mirror, for the truth is otherware. In the holding of hands, the interplay of voices, speaking the language of home in this alien country. I find this a very moving expression of late love. It's not actually one of Valentine's best poems, technically, but I wanted to include it as an example of her writing as a lover in 1965, just as she had in 1930. Sylvia wrote of a more rational age, which she hoped would emerge in the 21st century. And this is it, all the best we can do so far. All writers in some way address the future and imagine time when their message in a bottle may be washed up on the shores of that foreign country where things are done differently and perhaps found by someone searching the tide line there for washed up treasures. In 1934, Valentine wrote about her poems. I can imagine someone like me getting them out of the London Library and reading them with something in even 75 years time, which again puts her imagined reader in this century. And I wonder, who did she mean by someone like me? A reader, a library goer, a poetry lover, a literary adventurer who explores the work of lesser known authors, perhaps a writer themselves. And also perhaps a gender transgressive, one of those comrades she called, people like me. Someone anyway, who would recognize her voice as I did on reading that first poem and as I know many others have and will. And what did she mean by reading them with something? I think she meant with some response, some true hearing of the transgressive voice within, some appreciation of how wild and strange this poet was and how committed she was to speaking her truth, whatever the cost. It seems appropriate to end as we began by hearing that voice in Valentine's poem, reading my own works, which again addresses us directly. I hear my own voice over the desert of days. Across the sandy stretch of the war, I see my own words. And I had almost forgotten that once I could speak, you who read words when you want them, who turn on the tap of the book, who pour a poem half emptied down drain. It is urgent you understand how bounteous the words looked, how coolly the mirage flowed over sand. Thank you. Thank you, thank you audience for listening. Thank you, Jonah and Brett behind the scenes and Liz. And if you have any questions, you can just send them in through the chat and I will be able to look at them in a minute. Hi, Francis. This was amazing. We did have a couple of questions come in, so I'm going to ask you one of them. So maybe we can take a couple of questions. What were the primary sources you used to write the book and were you able to interview anyone who knew Valentine personally? Yes, well, read the book and it will tell you all about this. So it's a very good question. Yes, I was very lucky to have access to a lot of primary sources. Sylvia outlived Valentine by almost nine years and one of her great solaces really was to ensure that they would be remembered together. One of the ways she did this was to make sure that huge amounts of archive material about them were preserved. And they are in an archive in Dorchester and there is absolutely everything in there from their shopping lists, you know, to diaries that run throughout their lifetime both kept diaries. So you have sort of two sides of the story, all their manuscripts, poems and so on. So there's a huge amount just there of primary material. Apart from that, they both wrote enormous numbers of letters. So to each other, there are thousands of letters, but also they both written to other people. So again, many, many, many versions, different stories of what they're doing. Valentine wrote multiple autobiographies. So again, many versions, many possible ways of telling the story. Also, because I began to write the book or 20 years ago, just on. So then there were, I mean, there are still plenty of people alive who remember them, but I mean, lots more were alive than who remember them as adults. And so I was able to interview many people who knew them. Sylvia's cousin, Janet, was a particularly good source because she'd known them all her life and was very, very close to them. But I interviewed many friends, many people who'd known them in various ways professionally. And that was extremely interesting. One of the most interesting things I think is that. When you do that as a biographer, in some ways, you know more about the person in certain ways, of course, than lots of the friends who've known kind of one aspect of their life. And yet, and of course, in another way, you can never know them as well. My mother was the biographer Caroline Bingham. And when she was writing, she wrote mostly about Scottish history. And she was writing one about Robert the Bruce. And she said, you know, one glimpse of him would be more than all of the sources that she could read. Because and that is, of course, true in a way, which is partly why I think the photographs of which there are quite a few. You know, they are very evocative of the period and the moment. But yes, she's a wonderful subject because there is there is so much primary material. There's another quick question. Well, this is definitely not a quick question, but we'll ask it anyway. Can you say a little more about how she expressed her gender nonconformity in her poetry? Yeah, it's an interesting question. It is a very big question. But briefly, the way that I see it, mainly are the two ways that I just briefly mentioned in the talk. One is that I think that when she writes as a lover, she's writing very explicitly as a woman. And yet when she she says, at the same time, she calls herself he in certain ways that I think go far beyond just the sort of period usage of, you know, he is like he means all people. And we know the answer to that from Andrew Mitchell. No, he doesn't. But the. I think that the way that she does it in the political poems and the spiritual poems, the landscape poems is that way that she's always present in the poem. It's it's always I I saw this this happened. And I think that. You know, when I first read them, I thought, are these incredibly kind of egocentric poems because she's there so much. She's always there. She can't write about anything without putting herself in it. And it is her, you know, it's not. It's not she's not personalizing something else. And then I thought, no, what it is is that she is this queer person and she's there. And so she's when she's witnessing whatever it is, you know, the stars in the sky or the trees coming out or the water flying past or something, there is this queer person who's doing it. And the same with the, you know, the history. The the protest poems, I think that it's a queer eye seeing the world, witnessing it and protesting against it. Would you be able to tell us about when you first heard of her in her work, your first encounter with her? Yeah, I actually. Long, long time ago, my mother asked me if I knew about her and Sylvia as a couple. And, you know, I sort of read one of Sylvia's novels, I just go, but I didn't really know about them. And I was wasn't very interested then. I was sort of thinking about something else. So it wasn't quite a long time that I I read. I think I read for Sylvia first, the memoir. I read Sylvia's diary actually before that. And Valentine comes out of that in the most extraordinary way. She's such an amazing person. So that was how I first read about her. I then read everything else I could lay my hands on. There was very little poetry in print then. And when I read the poetry, I just thought this is such an amazing voice. I must find out more about it. And it went on from there. And of course, you've got you've edited. You've edited some of the poems in the compartment of a book. That's right. It is still in print. It's published by Carkinet. You can buy it. And it's got the poems are chronological. It's also got the whole of Whether or Dove or Seagull. So it's got the poems by Sylvia, the exchange of love poems that they wrote to each other, which was out of print for many, many decades. And that I published that before the biography. And it has got a kind of critical analysis of the poems in it as well. I've got quite a lot more in it about all that technical stuff. I'm going to give you the last question. I'm going to. It's from Denise. She wonders if Sylvia and Valentine's upper class backgrounds were factors in allowing them freedom to live as they wish. That's a very interesting and very good question. I think very often that was true. There are quite a few cross-dressing women I can think of in that period, like the writer, the artist, Gluck, and the writer, Breyer, who were both immensely rich and I think certainly were able to buy their freedom that way. Valentine and Sylvia, it's a little bit more complicated than that because I think that they weren't anything like that well off. And some of the time money was actually quite a struggle for them so that although they did have upper class backgrounds to an extent, they were more de-classed, I think, by their by their communist sympathies. And, you know, by the way, they didn't have any servants. They did their own, you know, for somebody of that class at that era was extraordinary. They did their own work and so on. And although, of course, they had class privilege, you know, they sounded incredibly posh and I'm sure they had that I mean, Valentine actively tried to take on that kind of, you know, male entitlement thing. So I think it probably did help. And yet at the same time, I feel that it didn't help as much for them because of their communism, the MI5 thing and the way they chose to live as it probably did for quite a lot of people, other people in the same situation who sort of maintained that class more rigidly. Well, thank you very much. This was a fascinating, fascinating, insightful evening. Just for everyone, it's you can get a link to to purchase the book in the chat. Brett has put something in there and take you to Gaze, the word where you will be able to to do that. So you get the book. Thank you very much, Francis, for being with us this evening. And thank you, our lovely audience. When the event finishes, the pop up question on the survey that will come up, do fill that out if you can. You'll find more information about the British Library Cultural Events Program on our website. Do look at the BL player pages to find out to find other events that we've done in the past related to LGBT. Lives, the library is open and you can get tickets to see our current exhibition, Unfinished Business, The Fight for Women's Rights. Thank you very much. Thank you, Francis. Thank you for joining us. Have a good evening.