Gamel Woolsey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamel_Woolsey

Gamel Woolsey (c May 28, 1897 – January 18, 1968) was an American poet and novelist.

• Born on the Breeze Hill plantation in Aiken, South Carolina, as Elizabeth (Elsa) Gammell Woolsey, but later took her middle name, which she shortened to "Gamel" (a Norse word meaning "old").
• Daughter of planter William Walton Woolsey (1842–1909), who William had first married Catherine Buckingham Convers, daughter of Charles Cleveland Convers, who died in 1888. Gamel's aunt, Sarah Chauncey Woolsey – better known by her pen name, Susan Coolidge – wrote the popular Katy series and other children's fiction.
• Gamel's mother was Bessie Gammell, her father's second wife. Bessie was the daughter of William A. Gammell and traced her maternal ancestry to William Washington. Reference https://books.google.com/books?id=uCk4AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA49

After her father died, the family moved to Charleston, where Gamel went to day school.

Bertrand Russell and Gamel Woolsey by Kenneth Hopkins

1939 Register

Bell Court,Church Lane,Aldbourne , Marlborough and Ramsbury R.D., Wiltshire, England

• Edward F Brenan 07 Apr 1894 Male Author Married 140 1
• Elizabeth G Brenan 28 May 1901 Female Authoress & Unpaid Domestic Duties Married 140 2
• Maria L Richards (Recelioni) 01 Mar 1918 Female Unpaid Domestic Duties Married 140 4

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Marriages Sep 1947

• Brenan Edward F Brenen Hampstead 5c 2440
• Brenan Edward F Hunter Hampstead 5c 2440
• Brenan Elisabeth Brenan Hampstead 5c 2440
• Hunter Elisabeth G Brenan Hampstead 5c 2440

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First Husband - Rex Hunter
WIKI Rex Hunter

After arriving in New York in the early 1920s, he met and married (on 2 April 1923) the poet and writer Gamel Woolsey ... In 1927, he and Woolsey visited England.
Woolsey then separated from him after four years of marriage (her posthumous 1987 novel One Way of Love is said to be a semi-autobiographical account of their marriage), although they never divorced.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamel_Woolsey

Gamel Woolsey (May 28 1895 – January 18, 1968) was an American poet and novelist.

Life

Woolsey was born on the Breeze Hill plantation in Aiken, South Carolina, as Elizabeth (Elsa) Gammell Woolsey, but in later years took her middle name which she shortened to "Gamel" (a Norse word meaning "old"). Her father was plantation owner William Walter Woolsey (July 18, 1842 - 1909) . The Woolsey branch of the New England Dwight family, had influence in the law, the church and education. Her father had first married Catherine Buckingham Convers, daughter of Charles Cleveland Convers, but she died in 1888. Her aunt, Sarah Chauncey Woolsey – better known by her pen name, Susan Coolidge – wrote the popular Katy series and other children's fiction. Her uncles and cousins included three presidents of Yale University.

Her mother was her father's second wife, Bessie Gammell, daughter of William A. Gammell. Her mother traced her maternal ancestry to William Washington. After her father's death in 1910 they moved to Charleston, where she went to day school. Despite weak health following an attack of tuberculosis in 1915, she left home for New York in about 1921, hoping to be an actress or a writer. Her first known published poem appeared in the New York Evening Post in 1922. The following year she met and married Rex Hunter, a writer and journalist from New Zealand, but they separated after four years. In 1927, while living in Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, she met the writer John Cowper Powys and, through him, his brother Llewelyn and Llewelyn's wife Alyse Gregory. She and Alyse became friends for life, while with Llewelyn she had a passionate and painful love affair.

She left New York for England in 1929, settling in Dorset to be near Llewelyn, where she came to know the whole Powys family and their circle. Parting from Llewelyn in 1930, she married the historian and writer Gerald Brenan in a private ceremony, and they lived together, mainly in Spain, until her death. In 1933 she began an enduring friendship with Bertrand Russell, who wanted to marry her.

Woolsey, primarily a poet, published very little in her lifetime: Middle Earth, a collection of 36 poems, came out in 1931, Death's Other Kingdom, in 1939 and Spanish Fairy Stories in 1944. Her Collected Poems have been published since her death. Patterns on the Sand (unpublished) recalls her South Carolina childhood; One Way of Love, accepted by Gollancz in 1930 but suppressed at the last minute because of its sexual explicitness, was published by Virago Press in 1987. Gamel Woolsey died in Spain in 1968 of cancer, and is buried at the English Cemetery, Malaga.

From "GAMEL WOOLSEY: Eyewitness to the Spanish Civil War" By Zalin Grant

But I was indeed surprised by the reaction of other women to Gamel. When a woman is so lovely and accomplished and stylish, one sometimes hears a certain meowing in the background. But not with Gamel. She was loved by her women friends and acquaintances. I was talking to two women about Gamel, trying to get a less idealized version of her personality than I was hearing.

"Well," said one woman, "I think she could be a bit too dreamy."

"No!" said the other woman, quickly stepping in. "She was a poet. That's why she was dreamy."

Works written include:

• Malaga Burning: An American Woman's Eyewitness Account of the Spanish Civil War (book review) By Gamel Woolsey

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• Residence: 1910 - Millbrook, Aiken, South Carolina, USA
• Race: White
• Ethnicity: American
  • Reference: 1910 United States Federal Census - SmartCopy: Jan 16 2017, 22:03:34 UTC

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• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jan 16 2017, 22:14:11 UTC

Author. She was born in the plantation Breeze Hill, Aiken, South Carolina. After a time in New York, she met the writer Gerald Brenan and they married and moved to Spain. She is remembered for her books "Malaga's Burning," "One Way of Love," "Middle Earth," "Death's Other Kingdom," "Spanish Fairy Stories" and "Patterns of the Sand." She was one of the first chronicler of the Spanish Civil War. She was buried with her husband. Her epitaph reads: "No Temas Más al Calor del Sol." (No longer you are scared of the heat of the sun). (bio by: [fg.cgi?page=mr&MRid=46500104" target="_blank José L Bernabé Tronchoni)]

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Jan 17 2017, 1:24:26 UTC

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https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/woolsey-gamel/

Poet, novelist, memoirist. The exact year of Woolsey’s birth is not known–estimates vary from 1895 to 1900–but what is certain is that she was born and raised on Breeze Hill Plantation just outside of Aiken, South Carolina. The daughter of Charleston socialite Elizabeth Gammell and New York banker William Walton Woolsey, Gamel Woolsey–in adulthood she adopted as her first name a shortened version of her mother’s maiden name–spent what she later recalled as an idyllic childhood on the rural property that her father had purchased and that is still occupied by a branch of the family.

After the death of her husband in 1910, Woolsey’s mother packed up her two daughters and returned to Charleston where both girls attended Ashley Hall, an exclusive school for young ladies. As a member of Charleston society, Woolsey savored the often glittering social opportunities available to young women of her circle but also bristled at the restrictive gender roles imposed by the social conventions of that time. Very early, she sought escape through creative pursuits, acting in student dramatic productions and leading the editorial staff of the school literary magazine.

A diagnosis of tuberculosis in 1917–her father had suffered from the same condition and had moved to Aiken because of its reputation as a health resort–cut short the path that her family had set for her, which included an eventual marriage to a young man of her social station, and freed Woolsey to pursue her artistic inclinations. Accordingly, after a recuperative period in a sanitarium, she set out for New York City, found a place in Greenwich Village, and actively pursued a career as a poet.

All the while, men pursued her. First came a marriage to New Zealand journalist Rex Hunter–although they never officially divorced, the couple separated within four years of tying the knot–and then a long transatlantic affair with British writer Llewelyn Powys, who was himself married at the time to American writer Alyse Gregory–the latter fretted over her husband’s affection for Woolsey but supported his quest to have a child by the younger woman–and, finally, a forty-year relationship with writer Gerald Brenan. Woolsey’s delicate beauty and innate sensitivity aroused in her male admirers a desire to protect her from the larger world.

In England, while slowly extricating herself from the Powys entanglement and slowly awakening to the possibility of a life with Brenan, Woolsey published one book of poems entitled Middle Earth in 1931. A year later, in 1932, she confronted the aborted publication of her first novel One Way of Love–it was eventually released posthumously in 1987. Fearing legal problems because of the book’s rather straightforward depiction of a young woman’s determination to find a lover to match her dreams, the publisher Victor Gollancz changed his mind at the last minute. The book, which incorporates largely autobiographical material in a poetic style, focuses on the fate of Mariana, a southern girl who moves to the big city where she is immersed in a bohemian world of writers and artists and where she faces a number of challenges, including an unwanted pregnancy, in her quest to find romantic fulfillment.

Woolsey and Brenan moved to Spain in 1935; and except for a period during World War II when they were forced to return to England, Woolsey lived in Andalusia until her death in 1968. Her first-hand account of the Spanish Civil War, published in England as Death’s Other Kingdom in 1939 and in America as Malaga Burning in 1998, is probably the most important of her works published during her lifetime. It is an eyewitness record of the early years of the war by a foreign resident whose life and the lives of the natives of the coastal city of Malaga are forever changed by the bloody conflict.

Her other book inspired by her adopted country is a collection of popular folk tales that she translated into English; first published in 1944, Spanish Fairy Stories was reissued in an expanded edition with illustrations by Anglo-Spanish artist Armengol in 1946.

As with her first novel, however, most of Woolsey’s works have seen the light of day after her death. Her poetry was issued in a number of volumes by Kenneth Hopkins and the Warren House Press in the United Kingdom: Twenty-Eight Sonnets (1977), The Last Leaf Falls (1978), Middle Earth (reprint, 1979), The Seeds of Demeter (1980), The Weight of Human Hours (1980), and Collected Poems (1984). The very best of these poems are either nostalgic–“All That the Child Remembers Now” and “On Breeze Hill Plantation” hearken back to her formative years in Aiken– or echo some of the themes of her adult fiction–“For the Flesh” captures the urgency of physical love.

Much of this poetic sensibility is also evident in her long lost novel Patterns on the Sand, which she wrote in England in 1947 but withdrew from submission when it suffered rejection by just one publisher. Rediscovered in manuscript form in a library in Texas in 2000, the novel is set in the South Carolina lowcountry during the period that Woolsey herself was reaching early adulthood in Charleston. The book finally found a publisher in 2012 when Sundial Press in the United Kingdom released a hardcover edition, a project spurred in part by the author’s posthumous induction into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 2011.

References

• Journal and Courier, Lafayette, Indiana, 21 Jan 1987, Wed • Page 14 < newspapers.com > Obituary for Gerald Brenan (Aged 92)