Valentine Penrose

Valentine Penrose (1898–1978) was a French poet and writer associated with the Surrealist movement, born in Gascony. She married the British artist and collector Roland Penrose in 1925 and lived through the Surrealist milieu of Paris and London in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to exhibitions and publications while developing her own literary practice.

Her poetry, dense with images of the feminine, the occult, and the body, was published in limited editions across several decades. Her most widely read work is La Comtesse sanglante (1962), a historical and literary study of the Hungarian noblewoman Erzsébet Báthory — who tortured and killed hundreds of young women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — written with a prose precision that treats its subject as both historical document and literary myth. The book, preoccupied with female cruelty and transgression, became a reference for later writers and artists engaged with the Gothic, the monstrous feminine, and the history of violence. Her collected poems, Dons des féminines (1951), remain less known but equally singular.