Valentine Penrose (née Boué; 1 January 1898 – 7 August 1978), was a French surrealist poet, author, and collagist.

[1] In 1925, she married the English artist, historian and poet Roland Penrose (1900–1984) and joined the community of surrealists based in Paris, Mougins and England.

[3] Valentine and Roland had different viewpoints on traditions in India, Eastern thought, and philosophy, which all led to a growing distance between the two.

[4] They were divorced in 1937, but met again in London during the war, after which she lived half her time with her ex-husband and his second wife, the American photojournalist Lee Miller.

Her poetry reflects her experience of automatic writing, collage and painting techniques such as Max Ernst’s frottage and Wolfgang Paalen’s fumage.

[1] Penrose's work was admired by Paul Éluard, who wrote prefaces for her first collection Herbe à la lune (1935) and Dons des féminines (1951).

[10] Penrose's collage artwork utilizes formal elements of Surrealism while disapproving of the conceptual aspects of Surrealist art, most often in relation to gender roles.

She was most outspoken about the brutality and misogyny sometimes depicted by Surrealists and was highly critical of certain figures within the movement, such as Max Ernst, who was also notable for his use of collage as a medium.

The format is fragmented and uses bilingual poetry in combination with the visual imagery of the collages to create disorientation and continuous translation.

The background for the works is typically of natural scenery or a landscape in which foreign elements are added, sometimes symbolically to create paradoxes.

Lesbian love is indeed a crucial theme in the book because it recounts the romantic escape of two women and their dreamlike adventures together.

This reference to the Mediterranean shows that exoticism is an important theme of the work, but also that Penrose inscribes herself into the Sapphic tradition of Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney or Charles Baudelaire to just a few emblematic figures.