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“ … written
by a long-lost Bronte sister.”
"One
of the joys of going into a used bookstore is the possibility of finding some
rare, forgotten treasure. If you’re a bibliophile, like I am, you know
the feeling I’m talking about: the excitement of taking something possibly
magical home, the deep, satisfying joy of finishing that book, knowing that
you’re maybe the first person in a long time to feel that deep, satisfying joy.
And that’s
how Gamel Woolsey’s Patterns
on the Sand felt."
Full review
by Matthew Simmons at the Southern Literary Review
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PATTERNS ON THE SAND
by GAMEL WOOLSEY
With an Introduction by BARBARA
OZIEBLO
A
'beautifully evocative story' - Gamel Woolsey's second,
previously unpublished novel.
 Patterns on the
Sand is Gamel Woolsey’s ‘long-lost’ second novel.
Written in England during the 1940s, it is a tale
of youthful
love set in Charleston and the South Carolina Low Country of Woolsey’s
youth.
It centres on the vague yearnings and sexual awakening of her main
protagonist
Sara, an outsider in the privileged Old South world of her friend
Elizabeth
Gordon and her brothers Rush and William. But Woolsey also skillfully
weaves a
murder mystery and an unexpected denouement into this beautifully
evocative
story.
‘Woolsey’s
narrative voice is laconic in its
description of the young women’s vapid lives and in its suggestion of
stereotypical southern languor, while the imagery, drawn from nature,
gives the
text a rich, sensual colourfulness.’ So writes Professor Barbara
Ozieblo, who
unearthed the work from the archives at the Harry
Ransom Humanities
Research Center at Austin, Texas , in her informative introduction to
the
published volume. ‘It is also a novel which shows how difficult it is
to escape
from the constrictions imposed by society and how the past, although it
has to
be acknowledged, must also be surpassed.’
Woolsey tried
to get Patterns of the Sand
published in 1947 but after its initial rejection despondently withdrew
it and
it has essentially remained gathering dust every since. Neither of her
two
novels nor most of her poetry was published in her lifetime. It would,
therefore, doubtless have pleased Gamel greatly to know
that on March 18 2011 her achievements were recognized in her home
state when she was posthumously inducted into the South Carolina
Academy of
Authors.
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Price:
£14.50 Hardback
ISBN-13:
978-1-908274-13-7
Book
Dimensions: 210 × 148 mm Publication Date: 24
September 2012
Now
in stock and available to order direct from The Sundial Press (see
end of this page).
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“Big
breakers were rolling in, with white foam
creaming at their green-glass edges, monotonously falling and receding,
printing for a moment their intricate foam patterns on the sand. Hordes
of tiny
fiddler crabs skittered away backwards in front of the intruders,
absurdly
threatening them with inch-long claws before disappearing down their
minute
holes. Here and there flat sea-biscuits starred the beach among conch
and
cockle shells and little transparent ones like scraps of Venetian glass.
Sara wanted to linger and
gather these
remembered childhood treasures, but they were all unconsciously
hurrying
towards the sea. Once she did pause for a moment and leaned down to
pick up the
first bit of coral she had seen, but she started back for just beyond
it lay a
huge horseshoe crab, its dark shield-shaped shell like a piece of
abandoned
armour.”
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PATTERNS
ON THE SAND
Full jacket layout
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PATTERNS ON THE SAND
O Caroline, Caroline, child of the sun,
There are battles with Fate that can never be
won!
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"In
Patterns on the Sand,
Elisabeth Gordon, the representative of the
Old American South in the novel, softly recites these two lines by the
Unionist
poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, doing so with barely a trace of bitterness.
It is
one of many poignant moments where Gamel Woolsey, whose second novel is
here at
last published for the first time, conveys her recognition that myths
of grandeur and memories of defeat cannot
sustain the present and that desire, illness, death, war – or simply
inescapable fate – control our lives. Just as the War Between the
States had to
be fought, but could never have been won by the Secessionists, so we
all,
Woolsey tells us, have to fight our own losing battles."
From the
Introduction by Barbara Ozieblo
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manuscript of Patterns on the Sand
was discovered by
Barbara Ozieblo in the Kenneth Hopkins Collection at the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, during her
time
there as a Visiting Research Fellow in 2000. |
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BARBARA OZIEBLO
teaches American Literature at the University of Málaga, Spain. She is
the
author of Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (2000)
and is currently
working on a joint biography of Alyse Gregory and Gamel Woolsey.
* * * * *
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| During
the years Gamel Woolsey and Gerald Brenan spent in England, before
returning to
Spain in 1952, Woolsey wrote a second novel, Patterns in the
Sand,
which, until now, has never been published. Here, she evokes the
Charleston she
had known as an adolescent, its pseudo-aristocratic mores which stifled
all women’s
ambitions and desires and made their days melt into one continuous
session of
waiting for something to happen behind drawn curtains, sheltered from
the
musty, cloying heat and from the busy, exciting life that men lead in
the
public sphere. When something does happen to Sara Warren it is the only
thing
that can happen to a woman in such circumstances: she falls in love and
learns
the pleasures of the body — and the perils of pleasure. Not directly
based on
Woolsey’s life, this short novel is more tightly structured than its
predecessor, One Way of Love, and more moving. |
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ReadSC
South Carolina Center for the Book:
Publication Date: 24 September 2012
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PATTERNS ON THE
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by GAMEL WOOLSEY |
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