Valentine Ackland (1906–1969)

Valentine Ackland was an English poet and short story writer, an important figure in the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century Britain. She was a friend of Nancy Cunard, and later the lover of the novelist and poet Sylvia Townsend Warner. The two women originally were brought together by their shared opposition to European fascism. Ackland and Warner lived together in Dorset, jointly publishing a collection of their poetry Whether a Dove or Seagull (1934). Ackland's own collections of poetic works, The Nature of the Moment (1973) and Further Poems (1978) were published posthumously.