‘If hate were love, if love were hate,
It could not make our tale untold…’[1]
Few poets have the honour of providing the title for an international bestseller. Even fewer watch the words they wrote grace subsequent film posters and soundtracks without acknowledgement. Yet when Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water took its title line from part two of Kathleen Raine’s poem ‘The Marriage of Psyche’–a work inspired by the Highland cottage they had once shared–it was merely the latest twist in a tortured, ‘some-requited’ love that would see a man attain worldwide literary acclaim while ‘the woman in his life’[2] was either ignored completely or condemned as a lovesick witch.
Kathleen Raine met Gavin Maxwell in 1949 and was initially unimpressed by this would-be portrait painter, struggling to recover from a recent nervous breakdown. Divorced and living apart from her two children as she strove against the odds to carve out a career as a woman poet in London, Raine’s deeply felt creative vision was finally beginning to bear fruit. Earlier that year, she had published her third poetry collection, The Pythoness, and she was also cultivating a blossoming academic career as a William Blake expert. An intense spiritual passion for the natural world informed her work, and it was through this love of nature–as well as their shared childhood memories of Northumberland–that Raine and Maxwell came to connect. Within weeks of meeting, both were astonished to realise that they had separately written the same poem: bearing witness to near-identical visions of a mysterious rowan.[3]
When Maxwell confided that ‘he could not love me with erotic desire’[4] –male homosexuality being punishable in 1950s Britain by prison or chemical castration–Raine resolved that their relationship could still survive in a spiritual, Platonic sphere. Her indefatigable support for his writing is clear. Her literary connections were vital in the early years of his career. Most notably, he was first published by New Statesman literary editor Janet Adam Smith, Raine’s dear friend and godmother to her daughter Anna. In reciprocation of sorts, Maxwell shared with Raine his remote Highland cottage Sandaig: a primordial, almost mystical spot nestled between sea, shore and sky, encircled by a silvery burn and with a rowan tree outside the door. Raine stayed at Sandaig frequently and found the landscape a source of profound inspiration, encapsulated by her 1952 Arts Council Poetry Prize-winning collection The Year One. Determined to demonstrate her commitment to Maxwell and their unconventional bond, Raine also took care of his pet otter Mij: their ‘waterbaby’ through whom it seemed ‘Gavin and I were united … in him I loved Gavin; in his love, a part of Gavin loved me, and Gavin through him accepted a part of my love’.[5] ‘We met at last in the heart of an otter,’ Maxwell inscribed Raine’s copy of his first book, Harpoon at a Venture.
But in 1956 after one of several bitter quarrels, bereft at what she believed was Gavin’s rejection of her love and all they had shared, Raine uttered a ‘heart’s cry’ at the Sandaig rowan tree. ‘Let Gavin suffer, in this place, as I am suffering.’[6] Mij died almost a year later, clubbed by a local villager after escaping while in Raine’s care, and she blamed herself mercilessly for the tragedy.
‘I have watched the water falling
Into the dark pool…
In the shade of the rowan tree
I have watched all day
On the stone until the sun was gone,
But the white foam
Has not washed the stain of blood
From my shroud.’[7]
Maxwell’s initial forgiveness soon curdled into resentment and recrimination, and the pair were estranged by the time Maxwell’s bestselling Ring of Bright Water was published in 1960. ‘The Ring,’ part two of Raine’s ‘Marriage of Psyche’ poem, appeared in its entirety opposite Maxwell’s foreword. Yet Raine’s name was buried amidst his acknowledgements and the collection containing the poem was mistitled. Even today, the legacy of this ambiguously formatted attribution means that the audiobook version of Ring includes her full poem without crediting Raine at all.
The year after Ring’s publication, Maxwell shocked friends, family and fans alike by announcing his engagement to another woman. One day after his wedding, during which Maxwell’s former boyfriend served as best man, a devastated Raine left for America. Her rigorous yet imaginative research into Blake had been gaining ground throughout the preceding decade and she was invited to become the first woman in history to deliver the prestigious A.W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. On her return to London, she met Maxwell by chance (already acrimoniously separated). ‘For the duration of a heart-beat, I was back in life … the moment was a fragment from a world which no longer existed. Like the sensation of an amputated limb…’[8]
‘But meeting, long after, in a city street, my dear companion,
It was as if the grave had opened and the light shone in.’[9]
Compelled to recover what she could of their connection, Raine shared the unpublished manuscript of her private memoir. Maxwell read only as far as her ‘heart’s cry’ at the rowan and, feeling outraged and betrayed, he blamed Raine for every misfortune that had befallen him since. Inadvertently, her words had once again given a gift to the man she loved: his next book, Raven, Seek Thy Brother, which used the narrative framework of the curse of ‘a poetess’ to lay the decline of his now world-famous Highland paradise at her feet. Again, Raine’s name was withheld, but there was no obscuring her identity from anyone who had known either writer throughout the last near-twenty years.
To me, the little-told story of the woman behind Ring of Bright Water feels darkly typical of patriarchal history. Most Scots have not heard of her. Those who have, invariably through Gavin Maxwell, encounter her as a humiliating footnote in his life. A 1970s film about him lacked even the courtesy of referring to Raine by name, describing her and crediting the actress who played her simply as ‘the rowan tree woman’. That tale leaves no trace of the woman who was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, a CBE, the Cholmondely Prize for Literature, the W.H. Smith Award, three Honorary Doctorates, the French Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and many other prizes for her visionary work. The woman who wrote fourteen poetry collections and four volumes of autobiography the last inspired by travels in India during her eighties), as well as two children’s books and a succession of paradigm-shifting academic publications. The woman who died aged 95, a beloved great-grandmother, after tragically being hit by a car while posting a letter.
In 2023, twenty years after her death, I hope that my novel The Rowan Tree (Valley Press) will help to share Kathleen Raine’s story with a new generation. Today, on what would have been her 114th birthday, let’s shine a light on the woman hidden at the heart of Ring of Bright Water.
The title of this piece comes from Kathleen Raine, ‘The Eighth Sphere’, from The Hollow Hill (1965).
Image of Katheen Raine is from wikicommons. Illustration of Raine with Mij is by the author.
Kirsten MacQuarrie is a writer in Scotland. Her work has been published by New Writing Scotland, The Scottish Poetry Library, Glasgow Women’s Library, Gutter Magazine, Scottish PEN, the Federation of Writers Scotland and others. She has been shortlisted for a Vogue Magazine Young Talent Award, twice winner of the Glasgow Women’s Library Poetry Prize and was a Non-Fiction judge for the Scottish National Book Awards 2021. Her first novel was Ellen and Arbor (2020) and her second will be The Rowan Tree, inspired by the true story of the ‘some-requited’ love between poet Kathleen Raine and author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell, forthcoming in 2023.
[1] Kathleen Raine, ‘In Answer to a Letter Asking Me for Volumes of My Early Poems,’ from The Lost Country (1971)
[2] Kathleen Raine, The Lion’s Mouth (1977).
[3] Raine, The Lion’s Mouth.
[4] Raine, The Lion’s Mouth.
[5] Raine, The Lion’s Mouth.
[6] Raine, The Lion’s Mouth.
[7] Kathleen Raine, manuscript poem, included in ‘The Written Word’: a speech delivered at the annual luncheon of the Poetry Society (1963).
[8] Raine, The Lion’s Mouth.
[9] Kathleen Raine, ‘Soliloquies Upon Love,’ from The Hollow Hill.
