Online Zoom Forum: Kathleen Raine: The Spiritual, Artistic and Scholarly Vision in Her Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 19 November 2025.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Prof Frances Spalding:
Bio: Prof Frances Spalding is a specialist in modern British art and the author of a centenary history of the Tate. She has also written several biographies, mostly on artists, including Vanessa Bell, Gwen Raverat, John Minton, Duncan Grant and on the poet and novelist Stevie Smith. In 2014 she guest-curated for the National Portrait Gallery the exhibition, Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision, and wrote the accompanying book with the same title. She taught for 15 years at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History, and left to become Editor of the Burlington Magazine for one year. Currently Emeritus Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She is also a FRSL, Hon.FRCA and was awarded CBE for services to literature in 2005.
She recently wrote the Foreword to Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism 1933-1943, by Andy Friend, to be published by Thames and Hudson in September of this year. It tracks the history of the AIA (Artists International Association). Each shift in its development is tied into the historical moment, with expert grasp of the tensions behind the world crises that lead to another world war. The blurb advises: ‘The Rise of the far right and authoritarianism in our own time makes this book vital reading for everybody concerned with visual culture.’
Speakers:
Prof Claire Garnier-Tardieu:
Title: Kathleen Raine, Mystic or Visionary?
Description: This presentation focuses on the spirituality of Kathleen Raine, a twentieth-century British poet (1908–2003), and seeks to determine whether she was truly mystical or merely visionary. Indeed, both in her poetry and in her autobiography, as well as in the scholarly essays she devoted to the English Romantics, to the poet and engraver William Blake, and to the Irish Nobel Prize W. B. Yeats, she conveys beliefs, moments of epiphany, and philosophical thoughts suggestive of a certain mysticism. And yet, if one relies on the works of Richard H. Jones (2024) or Glenn Alexander Magee (2016), one finds that the poet did not possess the religious spirit of the mystics, that she was not engaged in a spiritual quest in the proper sense of the term, nor did she truly adhere to any order or school. Rather, she was endowed with an exceptional faculty for recalling the paradise of childhood, above all through her love and knowledge of flowers, and, beyond that, for touching what one might call the invisible essence of the world.
Bio: Claire Garnier-Tardieu is Professor Emerita at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She began researching Kathleen Raine’s work in her youth and wrote her PhD dissertation on Kathleen Raine and the Tradition of Eden in Her Autobiography and Poetic Work (1984, University of Caen, under the supervision of Jacqueline Genet). She is the author of translations, several articles, an interview, and a biographical essay: Le Voyage poétique de Kathleen Raine (L’Harmattan, 2014). She also corresponded with Raine for a quarter of a century. In 2025, she co-edited a book entitled Kathleen Raine: A Voice for the 21st Century (Peter Lang).
Garnier-Tardieu, Claire and Stephens, Jessica (2025) (Eds). Kathleen Raine: A Voice for the Twenty-First Century. Peter Lang.
Jones, Richard H. (2024). A History of Mysticism. State University of New York Press.
Magee, Glenn Alexander (2016) (Ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esoterism. Cambridge University Press.
Raine, Kathleen (2019). Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber Ltd.
— (1973). Farewell Happy Fields. London: Hamish Hamilton.
— (1975). The Land Unknown. London: Hamish Hamilton.
— (1977). The Lion’s Mouth. London: Hamish Hamilton.
— (1998). Editorial. Temenos Academy Review 1, 5-17.
Sharaf El-Shaer, Mohamed. (1987). Mysticism in the Poetry of Kathleen Raine. Doctoral thesis. University of Durham.
Kirsten MacQuarrie:
Title: The Soul's Home is Where we Love: Imagination, Inheritance and Exile in Kathleen Raine's Scotland.
Description: Since earliest girlhood, Kathleen Raine understood Scotland as an ancestral lost Eden where, as she wrote in her first volume of autobiography Farewell Happy Fields (taking its title and epigraph from Paradise Lost) her poetic instinct was first awakened. Evacuated during the First World War to the Northumbrian hamlet of Great Bavington, a liminal land in literal sight of the Scots border, Raine's work came to be shaped by the propulsive if inevitably futile quest to reconcile this spiritual exile: reuniting through poetry with her soul's true home. This deep, at times desperate desire and sense of being simultaneously locked in and out of intimacy found its psychic mirror in Raine's torturously volatile twenty-year connection with Scottish author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell, whose world-famous Ring of Bright Water took its title, with questionable acknowledgement, from Raine's poem "The Marriage of Psyche". The conflicted spirit of Raine's relationship with Maxwell, and indeed with Scotland itself, helped to inspire much of her most powerful mid-century poetry, including collections like The Year One, The Hollow Hill and her evocatively titled The Lost Country. Perhaps most poignantly, Raine's epic poetic sequence of life, love and loss, On a Deserted Shore, written in response to Maxwell's death, teaches us that the soul's home is where we love, not where we live.
Bio: Kirsten MacQuarrie is a writer and chartered librarian from Glasgow whose debut novel, Remember the Rowan (Ringwood 2024; Red Squirrel Press 2025), inspired by the true story of the 'some-requited' love between Dr Kathleen Raine and Gavin Maxwell, was a finalist in The People's Book Prize and longlisted for The Highland Book Prize. Kirsten has previously been shortlisted for a Vogue Magazine Young Talent Award, a prize-winner in the Federation of Writers Scotland Vernal Equinox competition, selected as an Editor's Choice for the John Byrne Award, and twice winner of the Glasgow Women's Library Bold Types poetry prize. Kirsten's work has been published by New Writing Scotland, the Scottish Poetry Library, The Dark Horse, Postbox Magazine, Gutter Magazine, Scottish PEN, the Women's History Network, Edinburgh Literary Salon and others, and she is the editor of an upcoming anthology on Feminist Librarianship (Facet, 2026).
Dr Rowan Middleton:
Title: 'These Bleeding Selves': An Exploration of Woundedness in Poetry by Kathleen Raine.
Description: Woundedness is a theme that occurs in a number of Kathleen Raine's poems. This includes instances where hurt is inflicted or received in the course of personal relationships. At other times, woundedness takes on archetypal dimensions, either through the depiction of mythical figures, or through the consideration of wounding and woundedness as part of the human condition. There are also poems that touch on the possibility of healing.
Bio: Rowan Middleton teaches English literature and creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire.
Dr Caroline Watson:
Title: Kathleen Raine:
Artistic Connections and Collaborations.
Description: Professor Grevel Lindop, Chair of the Academic Board of the Temenos Academy – the academy established in 1991 by Kathleen Raine, Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble, Philip Sherrard and others which, ‘exists to affirm the sacred dimension of nature, life and the arts,’ – has remarked on a number of occasions, that it was time that a ‘Selected Letters’ of Kathleen Raine was published, adding, “She knew everybody…” A remark corroborated by Jonathan and Jessica Wordsworth in their contribution to the book ‘Lighting a Candle’ which commemorates Raine’s life and work, ‘How many letters did she write in her long life? Tens of thousands, surely…’
Undoubtedly, the more one learns about Raine’s life and works, the more one discovers how richly connected she was with a distinguished and diverse array of fellow writers, as well as composers, musicians, dancers, architects, theologians and artists.
For this forum I would like to consider briefly a few of her connections and collaborations with visual artists – particularly Barbara Hepworth, Sir Francis Rose and Julian Trevelyan.
Bio: Dr Caroline Watson is an independent scholar, single parent and full-time carer. She received her PhD at the University of Liverpool (2007), with the thesis, “Ancient Springs? A Study of Kathleen Raine’s Retrospective Assembling of Edwin Muir, David Jones, David Gascoyne and Vernon Watkins.”
She has presented the papers: “Poetry, Spirituality and the Divine: The Fourfold Vision of Kathleen Raine” at the ‘Women and The Divine Conference’ held at the Institute of Feminist Theory and Research, Liverpool University (2005); “Stone and Flower: Correspondences between Kathleen Raine and Norman Nicholson” at the ‘Norman Nicholson Society Conference’, Cockley Moor (2016); “Afternoon Tea with Kathleen Raine: The Sophia Perennis at Home – Parenting & Children’s Learning in the Light of the Imagination” at the ‘International Conference: A Homage to Kathleen Raine - Poet of times past or times to come?’ at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris (2022); “Spiritual and Psychological Renewal and Healing in the Eco-Poetics of Kathleen Raine” at the ‘Eurotas Conference: Creative Bridges – Embodied Consciousness, Psyche & Soul in Research and Practice’ in Oxford (2024) and, “Considering Kathleen Raine’s revitalising immersive imaging and imagining of the natural world, and how her poetic legacy enriches our attention, particularly in her expression of transformative experiences when encountering ‘other-than-human’ entities” as keynote speaker, at ‘Sacred Unity: Transpersonal Dialogues with Nature, Earth & Self’ the British Psychological Society’s Transpersonal Section Annual Conference at Cober Hill, Yorkshire (2025).
Her essay “Kathleen Raine’s Vision of Nature in Her Children’s Books” is in the book ‘Kathleen Raine: A Voice for the Twenty-First Century’, recently published by Peter Lang Group AG.
Dr Jenny Messenger:
Title: Mythmaking and Allegory in Kathleen Raine’s Autobiographies.
Description: This talk explores Raine’s use of Graeco-Roman philosophy as source texts for understanding consciousness, expressed through her Autobiographies. In these works, Raine applies her spiritual and artistic vision to her own life, reading it as if it were a text to be interpreted. She uses the tools found in ancient allegory and the trope of Platonic katabasis, the descent into the body or the Underworld.
Raine’s life writing restructures her chronological biography to show progressive alienation from what she sees as ‘full’ consciousness, which is unity between place and state of being, to rural life in northern England and then to the hells of Essex and Cambridge. But her work also offers a persuasive vision of how to achieve anabasis - the ascent from hell and a return to lost knowledge.
Bio: Jenny Messenger is a journalist and writer based in the UK. Her first book, Kathleen Raine: Classics and Consciousness, was published by Bloomsbury in July 2025.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
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