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’. 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. 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 While she felt that many of their letters could not be published as long as people mentioned in them were still alive, after Valentine’s death in 1969 Warner spent much time sorting and arranging their lives’ correspondence,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.

During the summer vacation, when many of the scholars went home to help get in the harvest, the Professor of History travelled about in search of Pictish remains—the likeliest sites for them being the so-called Fairy Knowes, which proved conclusively that fairies were imperfectly remembered Picts. The Lecturer in Rhetoric also travelled about for his own purposes, and was not above examining Pictish remains, in case they afforded a small footprint or a strain of harp music. If, as sometimes happened, the two men met, they conversed on blameless subjects, such as the prevalence of horse-flies or the clear atmosphere which presages rain; and parted. But in his forty-ninth summer James Sutherland had Foxcastle to himself. One might say it came to him as a reward of faith. A visiting Lecturer in Jurisprudence had remarked that, whether or no fairies existed, they influenced leaseholds: the legendary teind to hell which bound fairies to offer a living sacrifice every seven years making many tenants unwilling to begin a seven-year lease, or a lease of multiple sevens. On the offchance of finding a fairy legally recorded, James Sutherland used to buy bundles of old law papers off the scrivener’s stall in the market. Nothing came of it till the day he saw the name Foxcastle in a disputed ownership of a sheep walk in Peeblesshire. Foxcastle. Folks Castle. The meaning jumped to the eye. It was a long journey to make on foot, but if it had been as far as the Indies he would have made it.