So was the witch Gavin Maxwell blamed for destroying his life with a curse actually the poetic genius behind his greatest success Ring of Bright Water?

On a storm-lashed night, her body engulfed in fury, poet Kathleen Raine pressed her palm against the mystical rowan tree and cursed the object of her indignation.

Wretched and alone, she damned Gavin ­Maxwell: a writer who had brought such joy with his literary masterpiece Ring of Bright Water but who had heaped misery upon her. 

Aloud she implored: ‘Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now.’

For poet Raine this crazed act was a cry from the heart; a railing against the unrequited love she harboured for the famed author.

Ironically, those impassioned words on that ill-fated night would come to harm her above all others. Maxwell would later use Raine’s ­impetuous invocation to cast her in the lie of a malignant force, a ‘witch’ who brought about his downfall with her sorcery.

Mij’s story became a hit film starring Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna

She was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, a literary doyenne who was to become a trusted mentor to King Charles, but her legacy would be forever tainted by her tempestuous relationship with Maxwell.

Raine had been a seminal figure in Maxwell’s life – he used her poetry for the title of his bestseller Ring of Bright Water. But their 20-year connection was doomed. 

Maxwell was gay, with no sexual interest in women, and their romantic impasse ­tortured Raine.

Some Maxwell devotees still blame the ‘curse’ for the misfortunes which befell the writer: the death of his beloved otter Mij and even the cancer which was to take his life when he was 55.

After a fire destroyed his Highland home in 1968, killing another of his pet otters, Edal, Maxwell sent Raine a letter of rebuke. 

He wrote: ‘Whether or not your curse has been respons­ible for this terrible disaster I don’t know. If it was, I can only say God forgive you.’

Now a book is shining a fresh light on this dark and turbulent relationship, reframing the narrative from Raine’s perspective.

Kirsten MacQuarrie’s Remember the Rowan is a ­fictional reimagining of their relationship, based on Raine’s letters and writings and told through her voice. 

It paints a picture of a woman who has been unjustly vilified in the Maxwell story and, equally insulting, often written out of it.

In her book, MacQuarrie evokes a poet who was not the embittered and lovelorn ­creature she has been portrayed as but an intellectual giant and unstinting support to Maxwell.

Raine often emerges the real victim – of Maxwell’s neediness and narcissism.

MacQuarrie said: ‘Kathleen has in no way deserved the ­condemnation and mockery she has faced. 

It incenses me that a woman of such intellectual ­brilliance was either ignored completely or ­portrayed as a lovesick and deluded woman.

‘In Scotland she has been so overshadowed by the Maxwell connection. She has ended up carrying the can for his suffering. 

Gavin Maxwell with a pet otter

She was a scapegoat for his own inefficiencies and she has gone into notoriety and legend as a witch, while he attained worldwide literary acclaim.’

It was in 1949 that Raine’s ­publisher Tambi fatefully brought Maxwell to her home in London’s Chelsea.

Raine was 41 and Maxwell was six years her junior and she initially showed little interest in him, dismissing him as just another struggling artist.

But she was intrigued when Maxwell mentioned his childhood memories of Northumberland, a place where she had lived with an aunt during the First World War, and which was dear to her heart.

Maxwell, born in the village of Monreith, Wigtownshire, was connected to Northumberland through his aristocratic bloodline. 

His mother was Lady Mary Percy, a daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, one of the richest landowners in Britain.

His father was Colonel Aymer Maxwell, who was killed in Antwerp by German artillery in December 1914 when Maxwell was three months old.

Raine was born in Ilford, Essex, her father George was a schoolmaster and Methodist lay preacher whose ambition for her was that she become a housewife. 

Her mother Jessie was a romantic dreamer from Scotland, a country she conjured for her daughter as a mythic, green paradise which she should ­consider her real home.

MacQuarrie said: ‘Kathleen felt almost in exile, that it was ­Scotland where her heritage came from and that it was there she truly belonged.’

Over time Maxwell and Raine developed a deep connection, forged through a mutual passion for the arts, conservation and the wilds of Scotland.

When they met, Raine, a graduate of natural sciences from Cambridge, was a recognised poet. 

Earlier that year, she had published her third collection, The Pythoness.

Maxwell in contrast was in a slump. He had been invalided out of the Army in 1944 and had bought the Isle of Soay off Skye, where he set up a basking shark fishery.

The disastrous venture led to a nervous breakdown, the island was sold and financially he relied on his mother who regularly rescued him from his profligacies.

Once a head-turning beauty, Raine had two children from three failed marriages. 

But she felt so stifled by domesticity and the mundanity of motherhood, she gave over the care of her offspring to a relative.

The films title was ‘stolen’ from a work by Kathleen Raine

Raine saw in Maxwell a soulmate who would provide her an escape to an untethered life where her poetry could blossom.

When Maxwell admitted he was homosexual and could not love her with ‘erotic desire’, she was shocked and hurt and in her Christian piety wrestled with what she saw as sin.

But Raine convinced herself that together they could navigate his unassailable sexuality, that it would be enough to share a platonic love and a spiritual intimacy. 

Time would prove her disastrously wrong.

For Maxwell, their relationship was a useful smokescreen at a time when homosexuality was illegal and punishable with imprisonment or chemical ­castration.

But he was also ­captivated by her and beguiled her with his ready charm. Soon after he met Raine, ­Maxwell told her: ‘Meeting you is as if a goddess has turned her head and looked at me.’

Initially Raine mentored ­Maxwell and her friendship with New Statesman ­literary editor Janet Adam Smith led to him being first published.

Maxwell reciprocated by opening up his life to her, inviting her to come for long stays at his light-keeper’s ­cottage at Sandaig, Inverness-shire. 

The remote home near Glenelg was later immortalised as Camusfeàrna in Ring of Bright Water.

MacQuarrie said: ‘It was a ­primordial, almost mystical spot nestled between sea, shore and sky, encircled by a silvery burn and with a rowan tree outside the door.

Kathleen found the landscape a source of profound inspiration.’

While there, Raine often cared for Mij, the otter Maxwell had brought home from his travels in Iraq and which she referred to as the ‘water baby’ which united them. 

Raine wrote: ‘In him I loved Gavin; in his love, a part of Gavin loved me.’

‘We met at last in the heart of an otter,’ Maxwell inscribed Raine’s copy of his first book Harpoon at a Venture – the story of his failed shark business.

But the pair were emotionally disconnected and had furious fights, with Maxwell often being verbally abusive and cruel in the face of Raine’s devotion.

MacQuarrie said: ‘There was emotional abuse. Gavin was scathing and cutting in how he spoke to Kathleen. 

There was a cat-and-mouse dynamic where he would pull her closer and then push her away. Today we would call it gaslighting.’

Only once did they share a bed, when Maxwell was grief-stricken by the death of his devoted spaniel Jonnie, but Raine found it such a desolate experience she swore never to lie beside a man again.

In 1956, when Maxwell brought a young male paramour to Sandaig and banished Raine to a neighbour, she snapped. 

In a fit of pique, she headed to the Sandaig Rowan and cast her hex, having been told by locals that the tree had magical powers which could fulfil either a blessing or a curse.

When Mij died almost a year later, clubbed by a local villager after escaping while in Raine’s care, she blamed herself and the curse mercilessly for the tragedy.

In her book, MacQuarrie writes extensively about the devastation Raine faced when she couldn’t find Mij. 

She said: ‘I want people to empathise with Kathleen and how terrible she must have felt on the shore, looking for a little brown head that didn’t rise up again.’

Maxwell initially forgave her but his magnanimity didn’t last. MacQuarrie said: ‘That forgiveness soon curdled into resentment and recrimination.’

They were already estranged when Ring of Bright Water was released in 1960 and became an international bestseller. 

Only on publication did Raine see to her astonishment that Maxwell had taken the book’s title from her poem, The Marriage of Psyche.

The work is a tribute to her love for Maxwell and Sandaig and begins: ‘He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water. 

Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea.’

Though the poem appears in its entirety in the foreword to the memoir, Maxwell failed to credit Raine but for a tiny acknowledgment buried in the back.

The book was to make Maxwell rich and famous and Raine had to suffer seeing her stolen words adorn not only book covers but the publicity for the 1969 film starring Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. 

Raine’s part in ­Maxwell’s life was all but ignored in all of it.

In 1962, Maxwell entered a ­hopeless marriage to a socialite, which lasted only 15 months but devastated Raine. 

She left for the US where she had been invited to lecture, having become an expert on William Blake.

On her return to London, she met ­Maxwell by chance and, in the hope of restoring their friendship, she showed him an unpublished manuscript of her memoir.

When the story of the curse was revealed to him, Maxwell was enraged and he accused Raine of ruining his life.

He laid at her door all the unhappiness of the intervening years.

Maxwell had resented the invasion of privacy which had come with his fame and became increasingly curmudgeonly to his fans.

A ­spendthrift, he had soon frittered away his royalties on cars, boats and ­money-pit land deals.

His debts grew and he withdrew into depression, drinking and chain smoking, and Raine’s curse provided a convenient excuse for his self-destruction.

In 1968, in his book Raven Seek Thy Brother, he spitefully referred to the ‘curse’ of a poetess as responsible for shattering the paradise of his Highland sanctuary.

MacQuarrie said: ‘Raine’s name was withheld, but there was no obscuring her identity from anyone who had known either writer.’

When Maxwell died his ashes were ­scattered where Sandaig once stood. 

At his funeral most of his friends ignored Raine, subscribing to the notion that her ‘sorcery’ was responsible for his tribulations.

After Maxwell’s death, Raine created a successful and fulfilling life for herself. 

She wrote 14 poetry collections and four volumes of autobiography and gathered many admirers, including the then Prince Charles. 

She died in 2003, aged 95, after being hit by a car while posting a letter.

Charles arranged a memorial service in the Queen’s Chapel to celebrate her life and work. In his eulogy, the Prince told of how she had provided him with ‘inspiration, love and encouragement’.

All those same gifts she had given to Maxwell, but for which he showed her no gratitude.

• Remember the Rowan by Kirsten MacQuarrie is available now from ­Ringwood Publishing