In 1930, at the age of 37, Warner moved in with and became the lover of the poet Valentine Ackland, the woman who would become the love of her life. At this point, Warner’s only long-term relationship had been with the musician Percy Carter Buck, with whom she had begun a secret affair when she was nineteen. He was married, twenty-two years older than her, and had five children, and he had been her music-teacher since she was sixteen.28 Falling in love with a woman should have been a momentous shift of direction in terms of Warner’s sense of identity — she was, after all, now the lover of a woman thirteen years her junior, who was a rather dashing cross-dresser as well. They lived together in Dorset for the rest of their lives. The story ‘A Love Match’ (1966), from her collection A Stranger with a Bag, which displaces the sexual transgression from lesbianism to incest, provides the wry assertion that one did not have to move to Paris’s left bank if one wanted to pursue an unorthodox relationship; one could stay right where one was and count on the general inertia of one’s neighbours.

Their relationship began at a time when far greater dangers than lesbianism were looming on the horizon. The two women, like many anti-fascists of the period, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935. During the Spanish Civil War they joined a Red Cross unit and were active in the 1937 International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture.29 Warner’s political commitment found its expression for a while in an active involvement in Communist activities and in general anti-fascist work.30 We can also see the effect of her unfailing adherence to her father’s passion for history, in her case with an unwavering commitment to historical materialism31 as she explores, with an unfailing precision of vision, how we come to be who we are through the forces of society, class, and history. At the same time, her stories often revolve around the question of how a person might escape from these constraints rather than be defined by them.

In general, there is a free-spiritedness and independent-mindedness in Warner’s life choices that seem in tune with the cool matter-of-factness of the ethnographic gaze in her fictions. Her narrative voice rarely registers outrage or surprise at even the most unusual behaviours exhibited by her fictional creatures. ‘She had the knack of melting across barriers, rather than defining herself against them’.32 Her relationship with Valentine was troubled by Valentine’s tumultuous affair with the American scholar Elizabeth Wade White, as well as Valentine’s addiction to alcohol.33 But their relationship was Warner’s life’s project: exploring how freedom could be reconciled with love. While she felt that many of their letters could not be published as long as people mentioned in them were still alive, after Valentine’s death in 1969 Warner spent much time sorting and arranging their lives’ correspondence, constructing an autobiographical framework for their story and preserving the history of their love. The edited letters that would eventually be published posthumously as I’ll Stand by You (1998) are a moving and lucid account of a relationship, and an important contribution to the archive of lesbian history of which there is so much need and in which there are so few entries.34