Gamel Woolsey

Málaga Burning: An American Woman's Eyewitness Account of the Spanish Civil War (first released as Death's Other Kingdom in 1939) is a dramatic, beautiful and moving story. Through vivid character sketches and personal observations, Woolsey describes the people caught up in the bloody conflict.

Gamel Woolsey's startling novel about a woman's emotional and physical needs has for more than fifty years remained only in proof form. Intended for publication in 1932 it was withdrawn after the successful prosecution of The Well of Loneliness because of its sexual explicitness. At once graceful and naive, it follows the progress of Mariana Clare whose childhood reading of fairy tales convinces her that eternal love should not be reserved for immortals. Alone in New York at twenty-one, she is surprised by her bohemian friends' openness about sex, for it denies her own dreams about love's perfection. So too does the experience of marriage to Alan, but when they part she is still left with 'a curious fear that if she were not to find a lover she would be lonely in another world as well as in this.'

In her second novel, Patterns in the Sand, set in Charleston, S.C. a feminist exploration of a young woman's coming of age in a sexist and confining culture, set at the outbreak of World War I. Written in England in the early 1940s, the novel 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.