Elizabeth Gammell Woolsey
American novelist and poet Elizabeth Gammell Woolsey was born on Breeze Hill plantation in Aiken, South Carolina, on May 28, 1895. Growing up, she adopted a shortened version of her middle name and so is now better known as Gamel Woolsey.
Woolsey spent the first fifteen years of her life on the Breeze Hill plantation. Following the death of her father in 1910, the remaining members of her family moved to Charleston. It was in Charleston she realized how restricting the gender roles of the time were and therefore began exploring creative outlets such as acting and writing.
After recovering from a bout of tuberculosis, Woolsey left Charleston for New York City in 1921. A year later, her first published poem, “Faith at Forty Second Street,” was featured in the Evening Post. It was after her move to England in 1928, though, that she began establishing her reputation as an author, publishing Middle Earth, a collection of thirty-six poems in 1931. Death's Other Kingdom, published in 1939, made her one of the first American chroniclers of the Spanish Civil War. Considered to be one of her most important works, Death's Other Kingdom was published in the United States in 1998 as Malaga Burning.
While Woolsey achieved some success during her lifetime, a majority of her work was published posthumously. In 1932, the publication of One Way of Love was put on hold due to sexually explicit content and did not appear until 1987. Her Patterns on the Sand, which depicts the way she saw Charleston as a young woman and is often called one of her "long-lost novels" was written in 1947 but published in 2012. Volumes of her poetry, such as Twenty-Eight Sonnets, The Last Leaf Falls, The Seeds of Demeter, The Weight of Human Hours, and Collected Poems were all published between 1977 and 1984.
Gamel Woolsey died of breast cancer in 1968 at her home in Andalusia, Spain at age seventy-three.
-- Anna Patton
Woolsey spent the first fifteen years of her life on the Breeze Hill plantation. Following the death of her father in 1910, the remaining members of her family moved to Charleston. It was in Charleston she realized how restricting the gender roles of the time were and therefore began exploring creative outlets such as acting and writing.
After recovering from a bout of tuberculosis, Woolsey left Charleston for New York City in 1921. A year later, her first published poem, “Faith at Forty Second Street,” was featured in the Evening Post. It was after her move to England in 1928, though, that she began establishing her reputation as an author, publishing Middle Earth, a collection of thirty-six poems in 1931. Death's Other Kingdom, published in 1939, made her one of the first American chroniclers of the Spanish Civil War. Considered to be one of her most important works, Death's Other Kingdom was published in the United States in 1998 as Malaga Burning.
While Woolsey achieved some success during her lifetime, a majority of her work was published posthumously. In 1932, the publication of One Way of Love was put on hold due to sexually explicit content and did not appear until 1987. Her Patterns on the Sand, which depicts the way she saw Charleston as a young woman and is often called one of her "long-lost novels" was written in 1947 but published in 2012. Volumes of her poetry, such as Twenty-Eight Sonnets, The Last Leaf Falls, The Seeds of Demeter, The Weight of Human Hours, and Collected Poems were all published between 1977 and 1984.
Gamel Woolsey died of breast cancer in 1968 at her home in Andalusia, Spain at age seventy-three.
-- Anna Patton
