Trangressive Voice
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-07-21

Frances Bingham explores the life of gender-rebel poet Valentine Ackland

Valentine Ackland (1906 – 1969) was a poet, the lover of writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, and a lifelong gender-rebel whose unique voice still speaks to us today. 

Join biographer Frances Bingham for an in-depth look into Ackland’s life based on her new book, Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life. In this absorbing talk Frances explores the ways in which Ackland enacted her resistance to traditional gender roles – through cross-dressing, usurping male privileges, writing erotic poems, loving women – and the dangerous costs of this gender deviance, from being disowned by her father to being under MI5 surveillance.

Frances Bingham is a freelance writer, poet and playwright. Her books include Journey from Winter (2008), The Principle of Camouflage (2011) and London Panopticon (2020). She has also 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 Southbank Centre’s Literature and Spoken Word programme.

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