£15.99
20 May 2021
Pre-order now and receive your copy before publication!
At last, a biography of Valentine Ackland.
‘One November evening in 1925, two young women from London arrived at the village of Chaldon, in Dorset. They brought with them two suitcases, a gramophone, and a wooden boxful of records; the bare necessities. Both wore trousers and had Eton-cropped hair. The taller of the two, Mrs Turpin, had come to the country to recover from a recent operation to remove her hymen.’
Mrs Turpin was Valentine Ackland, on the run from her recent disastrous marriage. She was soon to meet the love of her life, Sylvia Townsend Warner, already a celebrity for her dashing debut novel Lolly Willowes. They would live in Dorset together in a passionate relationship until Valentine’s death in 1969.
Frances Bingham has written the definitive biography of this remarkable cross-dressing woman, poet and activist, recovering an important part of British lesbian history and creating a testament to queerness and gender identity in Valentine’s transgressive life. Her biography will be published on what would have been Valentine’s 115th birthday.
We will also be publishing an epub edition.
You can pre-order the paperback edition direct from us (it comes with an exclusive bookmark) by adding it to your cart below, and paying by PayPal or UK bank transfer.
You can also pay in euros and US dollars. Please email us at enquiries@handheldpress.co.uk to be sent the details for our euro and dollar TransferWise accounts, and we will organise your order that way.
Our books are stocked in North American bookstores, which may have cheaper despatch rates than we have to charge when sending from the UK.
Pre-orders will be posted by the end of April 2021.
Have you seen our splendid postcards? You can inspect and order them here.
UK: £15.99 (free p&p)
Rest of the World: £15.99 plus varying p&p shown at checkout
All our packaging is paper-based, renewable and recyclable.
Description
Valentine Ackland was a dedicated poet, deeply involved with Communism during the 1930s, and an environmentalist and peace campaigner. Recently released MI5 files show that she was blacklisted for confidential work during the Second World War, and remained under long-term surveillance. Despite her commitment to Sylvia, Valentine had many affairs with women who fell for her androgynous beauty and her masterful conduct of an amour. She also struggled with alcoholism, but her relationship with Sylvia survived all challenges.
Reviews
The Observer featured the book on 4 April: ‘A new biography of Ackland, out next month, is to reveal the level of secret service confusion about this unconventional pair of writers at the beginning of the long period during which they were both objects of state scrutiny. All their correspondence was stopped and read by MI5 officers without their knowledge, and Ackland’s later attempts to enlist for significant war work were blocked.’
You may also be interested in …
Sylvia made a friend in America, Elizabeth Wade White, who was a young poet and a dissatisfied heiress. Their relationship turned bitter when Valentine and Elizabeth fell in love, and Elizabeth would not let go. Read the story of their tumultuous relationships in Peter Haring Judd’s The Akeing Heart.
While Sylvia’s first novel, a fantasy, was succeeded by realist works and historical novels, she did not abandon the genre. In 1940 she wrote The Cat’s Cradle Book, a wildly imaginative collection of fables purporting to come from the tradition of cats telling tales to their kittens, and prefaced it with a long short story about her life with Valentine in a Norfolk manor, with their cats. These, and other fantasy short fictions, have been republished as Of Cats and Elfins.
After Valentine’s death Sylvia made a change in her writing. ‘I’m sick of the human heart. I want to write something completely different.’ She wrote the dark fantastical stories that would become Kingdoms of Elfin.
For more information about Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, visit the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society website.
