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PATTERNS ON THE SAND by GAMEL
WOOLSEY
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2021
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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previously unpublished novel.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
Paperback edition now
in stock and available to order direct from The Sundial Press (see below).
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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.”
From Chapter Two
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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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| The
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) .
* * * * *
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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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26 September 2018 Please note: We have now SOLD OUT of the hardback edition.
Paperback only available.
The paperback is now available to order below:
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PATTERNS ON THE
SAND
by GAMEL WOOLSEY
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| GAMEL
WOOLSEY |
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PATTERNS ON THE SAND Reviews
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“ … written
by a long-lost Bronte sister.”
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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.
Woolsey is a largely forgotten writer,
and this is her lost novel. A daughter of early 20th century
Charleston society, she was part of America’s “Lost Generation” of expats
living in Europe. She witnessed the Spanish Civil War and was
possibly Betrand Russell’s lover. And she wrote poetry, and memoir, and
fiction—including this gorgeous novel that went unpublished during her
lifetime, seeing print for the first time only in late 2012. And how
lucky we are for this, as this novel begins so simply, so unpretentiously, and
unfolds like something written not by a forgotten 20th century Southern
writer, but like a novel of the South Carolina Lowcountry written by a
long-lost Bronte sister.
Maybe I write in hyperbole here;
certainly, it’s not Jane Eyre (but what is?). But Patterns on the Sand
is an incredibly lovely book, written in sparse, dreamy prose, with a plot that
moves along so smoothly, so perfectly, you can’t help but continue reading,
can’t help but be hypnotized by its beauty. I read it in a sitting.
And then I read it again a few days later. It is just that kind of book.
Patterns is the story
of Sara Warren. Sara is not wealthy, she is not poor.
“Middle-class” perhaps does not explain it, as her family are not
tradesmen. Rather, she is a member of that loneliest class of people—and
that class that no longer exists—those who float on the periphery of high
society, unable to associate with those in the classes below, but not with
enough wealth or connections to exist comfortably within capital-S
Society. Yet, even though she can never be a full part of it, Sara exists
in Charleston Society, alongside her comfortably-Society friend Elizabeth
Gordon, and Elizabeth’s brothers, William and Rush. And early on, this
seems like little more than a novel of Pretty Young Things going to parties,
involving themselves in romantic escapades and the intrigue of snubbing and
being snubbed, things that are pretty to read but feel, largely, empty.
But that never feels like the whole
story. The Great War is still across the Atlantic, but on the minds of
everyone. There’s a darkness, a sadness underneath the surface that
points to this not being an empty novel, but something more sober, more
reflective, more contemplative, more meaningful. And as Sara’s
friendships and romances continue to develop throughout the novel, you start to
find the meaning, and begin to recognize Woolsey’s great talent. A
conversation on an empty beach is one of the more gorgeous and romantic bits of
dialogue you’ll read. A flirtation in the haze of a Charleston night is
chastely erotic in a way that suggests an odd marriage of James and
Lawrence. An unexpected tragedy late in the novel is a confusing,
heartbreaking occurrence that leaves you gobsmacked. You’ve been reading
for five hours; the empty novel of parties and Pretty Young Things has
unassumingly, subtly turned into something much more. And you don’t know
how it happened; but you feel so bloody lucky you were there to witness
it. And you tell a friend about this book, and you re-read it, and you
pass it along to someone else.
Woolsey never gives us a simple
conclusion to Sara understanding who she is, how she fits into a world she
can’t help but be a part of, but to which she can never belong. Woolsey
never mourns the Lowcountry world that, like elite Society all about the West,
is being dismantled by the Great War. Rather, what she gives us is a
wonderful evocation of a time and place, a social group, a single, intriguing,
and interesting woman who lives through all of this. It is a very good
thing Patterns on the
Sand has finally found
publication; it is a beautiful, and too-long-forgotten romantic
novel. |
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Reviewed by Matthew Simmons
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THE TIMES
LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
19 July 2013 No 8755
“Patterns on the Sand was completed in the
1940s but has only now found a publisher. It is a period piece in more ways
than one. Written in England but set in Gamel Woolsey’s native South Carolina
in the 1910s, it depicts the social conventions of early twentieth-century
Charleston and reveals a pervasive yearning for the “old days” before
the Civil War.
… an intrinsically nostalgic piece of writing: a loving recreation of a world
already homesick for its own past. Woolsey’s writing displays its own Southern
charm chiefly through lyrical descriptions of the South Carolina landscape, seasons
and flavours. She tells of the mist that makes “horizons in the South
seem further away”: her novel reproduces that experience, blurring our
sense of destination and time as it carries us into the past on an irresistible
emotional tide.” Lucy Carlyle
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PATTERNS ON THE SAND
by GAMEL WOOLSEY
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