Gamel Woolsey

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Gamel Woolsey (1895-1968), American poet and novelist, was born in Aiken, South Carolina, and named 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 a plantation farmer whose family had influence in the law, the church and education. 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.

Gamel 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 Patterns on the Sand (unpublished) recalls her South Carolina childhood; One Way of Love, accepted by Gollancz in 1930 but suppressed at the last minute because of its sexual explicitness, was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 in 1987. Gamel Woolsey died in Spain in 1968 of cancer.