Cunard published four collections of her own poems and in 1943, at the suggestion of Edward Thompson (father of the historian E.P. Thompson, and poetry editor for the publishers Benn), she began to assemble all the verse she wished to preserve, for an intended collected edition. Thompson died in 1944 and the typescript of the poems was left among his papers. These were eventually deposited at the Bodleian, and Cunard's poems have been retrieved from this typescript by the kind permission of Dorothy Thompson, to form the text of the present edition.