Alyse Gregory

Read a chapter from Hester Craddock 

Alyse Gregory

Alyse Gregory was born at Norwalk in Connecticut. One of her first great loves was music and she spent some of her early years in Europe training to be a singer, but on returning to the United States became involved in local politics and the woman’s suffrage movement, for which she was a fearless public speaker. In New York she began contributing articles to such publications as The Freeman, The New Republic and The Dial, becoming editor of this last journal in 1924. That same year she married the English writer Llewelyn Powys and moved with him to Dorset in 1925. Over the next six years she published three novels – She Shall Have Music (1926), King Log and Lady Lea (1929) and Hester Craddock (1931). These were followed by her only other published volumes – a collection of essays, Wheels on Gravel (1938), and an autobiography, The Day Is Gone (1948).

After Powys’s death in Switzerland in 1939, Gregory continued to live in the same house near East Chaldon with his sisters Gertrude and Philippa Powys. A sensitive and private person, she was a friend of many eminent writers of the day, including Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore and Sylvia Townsend Warner, but tended to remain in the shadow of her husband, whose work and reputation she did much to promote, while continuing to contribute her own articles to a variety of journals up until the late 1950s.

In 1957 Gregory moved to Morebath in Devon where she died ten years later. Excerpts from her diaries were published in 1973 under the title The Cry of a Gull. In 1999 Alyse Gregory: A Woman at her Window by Jacqueline Peltier was published (London, Cecil Woolf).

'My mind is multiple and I have a dramatic interest in the panorama about me, but life without the intimations that come to us through silent contemplation, through art, through nature, through music, through poetry, - through the ineffable, is a wilderness or a blind labyrinth. Habit destroys us, our evil tempers cloud our vision, eternity resolves all and reveals itself to us in the eyes of a cat, as well as in the clouds that move across the horizon ...' (From the Foreword to The Cry of A Gull )

"Alyse Gregory strove to follow as a responsible human being the arduous path of her life, paved as it was with difficulties and sorrow. She always held to 'the integrity of the individual and the old simple virtues of honesty, consideration for others and fidelity to [her] pledge'." (From A Woman At Her Window by Jacqueline Peltier)

[Dr Barbara Ozieblo, author of the Introduction to Hester Craddock, is currently working on a joint biography of Alyse Gregory and Gamel Woolsey.]

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