Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology

Jane Dowson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415130950
• eBook ISBN: 9781134790548
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Where were the women of the so-called `Auden Generation'?During this era of rapidly changing gender roles,social values and world politics,women produced a rich variety of poetry.But until now their work has largely been lost or ignored;in Women's Poetry of the 1930s Jane Dowson finally redresses the balance and recovers women's place in the literary history of the interwar years.This comprehensive and beautifully edited collection includes: *Previously uncollected poems by authors such as Winifred Holtby and Naomi Mitchison *Poems which are now out of print,such as those by Vita Sackville-West and Frances Cornford *Poems previously neglected by poets including Ann Ridler and Sylvia Townsend Warner *An extensive critical introduction and individual biographies of each poet Poetry lovers,students and scholars alike will find Women's Poetry of the 1930s an invaluable resource and a collection to treasure.

1

Valentine Ackland 1906—1969

1933 Whether a Dove or a Seagull, with Sylvia Townsend Warner, New York, Viking; London, Chatto & Windus, 1934

1957 Twenty Eight Poems, privately printed, London and Wells, Clare, Son & Co. Ltd

1970 Later Poems by Valentine Ackland, London and Wells, Clare, Son & Co. Ltd

1973 The Nature of the Moment, London, Chatto & Windus

1978 Further Poems of Valentine Ackland, Kent, Welmont Publishing

Mary Kathleen McCrory adopted her androgynous pseudonym ‘Valentine Ackland’ to rid herself of the nickname ‘Molly’, when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s. She had an Anglo-Catholic upbringing in Norfolk and a convent school education in London. She was received into the Roman Catholic church when she married in 1925 and she shortly left both her husband and the church. Her marriage was annulled and she returned to her Catholic faith in the 1950s, and finally became a Quaker. She did not, however, in spite of pressure from her family, become reconciled to physical love with a man, even though by 1932 she is alleged to have had twenty-seven affairs, five of which were with men and one of which resulted in a miscarriage in 1927. In 1930, she met Sylvia Townsend Warner with whom she lived, mainly in Dorset, until her own death from cancer. It was Valentine who initiated their involvements with the Communist Party, the Spanish Civil War, and socialist and pacifist activities, but after the Second World War she became more preoccupied with her personal relationships. Valentine's confessional autobiography, For Sylvia: An Honest Account., written in 1949, is an attempt to understand, to explain and to exorcise her secret drinking habit of several years and her affair with the American Elizabeth Wade White which had briefly taken her away from Sylvia Townsend Warner. She recounts her recurring and unresolved problem with loving two people simultaneously, but reassures herself that ‘I know beyond any doubt that my whole being is rooted in Sylvia’.¹ This combination of conviction and doubt concerning her identity, her Christian faith and her politics is evident in her poetry. She was an avid reader and fervent writer of poetry from childhood; Sylvia Townsend Warner admired in her what she herself found difficult in poetry, ‘the lyrical, short and loose formed’.² Although Valentine Ackland's poems were published in periodicals throughout the 1930s and 1940s in both America and Britain, she never became what she wanted to be, ‘a published, widely read poet’.³ The collections of her poems have mostly been published posthumously and little has been written about her poetry.

In 1937, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner moved house from West Chaldon to Frome Vauchurch, near Dorchester, but during the 1930s, they were often away, campaigning for the cause of democracy. The Reichstag Fire Trial in Germany caught their attention in 1933, and although initially suspicious of communists, they subscribed to the Daily Worker and Left Review, which was set up by Edgell Rick word in 1933, and for which Valentine wrote a series of articles called ‘Country Dealings’ which exposed the deprived conditions of the rural poor. In 1935, she and Sylvia joined the Communist Party and went to the Congress of Writers in Paris, which was also attended by Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson and Naomi Mitchison. In 1939 they went to the United States for the 3rd American Writers Congress in New York, to consider the loss of democracy in Europe and returned when war broke out. ‘Communist Poem 1935’, and ‘Winter’, which were printed in Left Review, register the atmosphere of doom which increased from the middle of the decade onwards.⁴ The disillusion of an erstwhile Conservative like Valentine was particularly acute: the sense of everything being rotten in Britain extended to Europe, and by the Second World War was perceived as a universal human condition. These poems also illustrate her difficulties when combining a political polemic with her preferred lyrical mode.

In September 1936, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner responded to an article by Nancy Cunard, published in the Daily Worker and News Chronicle, appealing for volunteers to help the Spanish Republicans. They gave assistance to the Red Cross Unit in Barcelona. On returning to England, Valentine Ackland intended to drive a lorry from London to Valencia but was too unwell to go. In 1937, she worked voluntarily at Tythrop House, near Thame, a home for Spanish refugee children. Like Sylvia Townsend Warner, she wrote prose and poetry about her experiences in Spain. Left Review not only published her poems, but also her reviews on books about the Spanish War and her translations.⁵ ‘Instructions from England’ is printed in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse. Its satirical tone indicates her endeavour to find a successful and contemporary aesthetic for a political cause; characteristically, she felt caught between two impulses, the traditional and the new:

I am still uncertain how to write poetry as it has to be written. Whether to carry on … for the present, trusting that (as has happened before) the difficulty of reading a ‘new’ style will wear off … Or whether to make a partial return to the old, simpler forms – renouncing the pleasures of inverting words and phrases; of using three-syllabled words; of using semi-scientific words; of assonance and rhyme … But we need something really hard. Not noisy and bombastic … but definite and deliberately reasonable,… well-devised and musical.⁶

Wendy Mulford considers that this professed uncertainty is the mark of Valentine Ackland's poetry and that she is at her best when wrestling with the ‘paradox of feeling’, as exemplified in the lyrics which represent the ‘shifting states of the lovers being’.⁷ ‘Poem’ is one of these and is likely to be a dramatisation of the Warner-Ackland-Wade White triangle. The other love poems here are taken from Whether a Dove or a Seagull, the co-operative volume which was an experiment in democracy by not divulging the authorship of individual poems. It was also an attempt by Sylvia Townsend Warner to help Valentine Ackland get her poems published. The poems’ exploration of lesbian sexuality in a society where it was forbidden may account for the book's poor sales. Valentine Ackland's poems depict the poet's characteristic dualities in their mixture of celebration and frustration. The title poem typically juxtaposes the voice which sings of love with the commentary of realism which insists on the instability of relationship. In ‘Overnight’ and ‘What must we do, if we cannot do this –’ the combined agony and ecstasy of secrecy provide the nervous energy of the rhythms. ‘The eyes of body’ is the most overtly erotic poem in the collection.

It is tempting, and in Valentine Ackland's case, also appropriate, to read the poems in terms of the poet's personality: always in two minds of optimism and dread. The voice of the poems is simultaneously self-negating and self-asserting. As lover, she both wishes for and fears emotional dependency. ‘The Lonely Woman’ at first seems to endorse the stereotype of the unhappy spinster or widow, but there is also subtle affirmation of the woman's independence and of the quietude which can belong to the unattached. The story of Fanny Brawne's unopened letter is brief and tragic, but again there is some suggestion of private exaltation amidst her solitude and secrecy.

The editor of Further Poems detects a consistent exploration of technique in the uncollected poems which span 40 years, and a new dimension to the poems of terminal illness. After Valentine Ackland's death, Sylvia Townsend Warner began work on a collected edition of the poems but found her own grief too overwhelming to be able to write an introduction or to complete the work.

Further Reading

Valentine Ackland, For Sylvia: An Honest Account, London, Chatto & Windus, 1985.

Claire Harman, ed., The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, London, Chatto & Windus, 1994.

Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland – Life, Letters and Politics 1930–1351, London, Pandora, 1988.

Communist Poem, 1935

‘What must we do, in a country lost already,
Where already the mills stop, already the factories
Wither inside themselves, kernels smalling in shells,
(‘Fewer hands – fewer hands’) and all the ploughed lands

5 Put down to grass, to bungalows, to graveyards already.

What's in a word? Comrade, while still our country
Seems solid around us, rotting – but still our country.
Comrade is rude, uncouth; bandied among youths
Idle and sick perhaps, wandering with other chaps,

10 Standing around in what is still our country.’

Answer them: Over the low hills and the pastures
Come no more cattle, over the land no more herdsmen;
Nothing against the sky now, no stains show
Of smoke. We‘re done. Only a few work on,

15 Against time now working to end your time.

Answer: Because the end is coming sooner
Than you allowed for, hail the end as salvation.
Watch how the plough wounds, hear the unlovely sounds
Of sirens wring the air; how everything

20 Labours again, cries out, and again breeds life.

Here is our life, say: Where the dismembered country
Lies, a dead foeman rises a living comrade.
Here where our day begins and your day dims
We part – announce it. And then with lightened heart
Watch life swing round, complete the revolution.

Winter

When the winter closes and the cold and the wet
Come, and there is no morning, no noon-day sun
And no light except half-light until night,
When we lie huddled together, to forget;

5 Then the word moves in us and we stir in our bed,
Clotted together in misery, hungry and time-besotted,
The drag of time on our hands and on nerves the nag,
Then we whisper together and the word we say is red.
Red and angry as the sun will be when it rises,

10 As the furnace-fires we kindle, as the fury which burns us,

The word unspoken in mind, soon to be spoken and heard,
Over screech of sirens when morning comes and the red sun rises.

Left Review, March 1936

Instructions From England 1936

Note nothing of why or how, enquire
no deeper than you need
into what set these veins on fire,
note simply that they bleed.

5 Spain fought before and fights again,
better no question why;
note churches burned and popes in pain
but not the men who die.

Left Review, March 1936

Poem

You send me a letter from far, from across the sea:
‘I read of a gale,’ you say, ‘blowing over your land,
And try to imagine in storm your country
That I saw in sun.’ You have stretched out your hand

5 But I cannot take it. A sharper storm had bl...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Women's Poetry of the 1930s
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Into the Whirlwind
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1  VALENTINE ACKLAND 1906–1969
• 2  FRANCES BELLERBY 1889–1975
• 3  LILIAN BOWES LYON 1895–1949
• 4  FRANCES CORNFORD 1886–1960
• 5  NANCY CUNARD 1896–1965
• 6  ELIZABETH DARYUSH 1887–1977
• 7  WINIFRED HOLTBY 1898–1935
• 8  SYLVIA LYND 1888–1952
• 9  NAOMI MITCHISON b. 1897
• 10  RUTH PITTER 1897–1992
• 11  KATHLEEN RAINE b. 1908
• 12  LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON 1901–1991
• 13  ANNE RIDLER b. 1912
• 14  VITA SACKVILLE-WEST 1892–1962
• 15  E.J. SCOVELL b. 1907
• 16  EDITH SITWELL 1887–1964
• 17  STEVIE SMITH 1902–1971
• 18  SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER 1893–1978
• 19  DOROTHY WELLESLEY 1889–1956
• 20  ANNA WICKHAM 1884–1947
• 21  THE LISTENER
• 22  TIME AND TIDE 1920–1976
• Bibliography