Cirrus@Austlit

'Aileen Palmer is one of only three women represented in a recent anthology of thirty-three poets writing about their experiences of the Spanish Civil War. The other two are English writers: Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner. In The Gender of Modernism Jane Marcus comments that the neglect of Warner's writing has occurred on many fronts: 'Left out of the literary histories of the Spanish Civil War presumably because she was a woman, she is left out of literary modernism because she was a communist and a lesbian. As her partner Valentine Ackland shared Warner's marginalities so, too, did Aileen Palmer, about whom could be added two more: she was Australian and she spent many years of her life in mental institutions.' (p94)