Gamel Woolsey (Brenan´s partner) was an American poetess and novelist

  -Retrato original María José González-

Elizabeth Gammell  Woolsey (May 28, 1895) was born in South Carolina. She shortened her name to Gamel: old. Her father was a cotton planter. Gamel's mother was her father's second wife. After he died, the family moved to Charleston, where Gamel grew up and went to school.

When she was a teenager, she developed  tuberculosis. Despite her weak health, Woolsey left home for New York City, she wanted to be an actress or a writer. Her first published poem appeared in the New York Evening Post in 1922. But she met Rex Hunter, a journalist from New Zealand. Gamel married him. She soon found that she had nothing in common with her husband. So, they separated after four years.

In 1927, while she was living in  Greenwich Village, she came into contact with the writer John Cowper Powys and his family, his brother Llewelyn and his sister in law, Alyse Gregory. Gamel and Alyse became friends for life, but  Gamel had a painful love affair with Llewelyn.

Gamel left New York for England in 1929. She was settling in Dorset to be near Powys, when she came to meet, in 1930,  Gerald Brenan. The Hispanist writer fell in love with her poems and her novel One Way of Love.  Later, they went to live together, mainly in Spain. Gamel was the perfect travelling companion for Brenan. Although the union was not a problem to sustain other intimate relationships to both sides. They did not have any children. So, they adopted Brenan's daughter, Miranda (Juliana, her mother, was a young girl who had worked as a servant in Brenan's house in Yegen). 

Gamel spent much of her time typing out Brenan's manuscripts, but she managed to find some space for her own works. Death's Other Kingdom in 1939 (re-released as "Malaga Burning" in 1998 by Pythia Press), One Way of Love  had been accepted by Gollancz in 1930, but suppressed at the last minute because of its sexual explicitness. In the end, it was published by Virago Press in 1987.Furthermore, she translated a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós into English, as The Spendthrifts, as well as a collection of Spanish  Fairy Stories in 1944. Her Collected Poems have been published after her death. Her novel Patterns on the Sand was published by The Sundial Press in 2012 and it recalls her South Carolina adolescence.

Gamel died in Spain in 1968. She was seventy-three years old  and was buried at the English Cemetery, Málaga. Now, she is next to Brenan's grave, who outlived her by almost twenty years. Brenan inscribed on the stone of her grave some words of the song from Cymbeline. Gamel had been fond of it: "Fear no more the heat o’ the sun/Nor winter’s furious rages."


Bibliographical sources

Woolsey, G. (1939): Death’s Other Kingdom. London: Longman’s.
- (1988): F. Partridge (Introduction): Death’s Other Kingdom. London: Virago Press Limited.
- (1994): El otro reino de la muerte (A. Torre Villalba y F.J. Díaz Chicano, trad.). Málaga: Ágora.
Ozieblo, B. (2003). Gamel Woolsey: Thwarted Ambitions. La lettre powysienne. Número 5, pp.38-43.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamel_Woolsey