Alyse Gregory

Alyse Gregory (1884, Norwalk, Connecticut – 1967, Morebath, Devon, England) was an American suffragist and writer.

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 women’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. In the 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 Llewelyn Powys' death from tuberculosis in Switzerland in 1939, Alyse continued to live in the same house near East Chaldon with his sisters, Gertrude and Philippa Powys. She was a friend of many eminent people, including Florida Scott-Maxwell (who had been a pupil of Jung), Malcolm Elwin, Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore and Sylvia Townsend Warner. She tended to remain in the shadow of her late 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 Alyse Gregory moved into Velthams Cottage, Morebath, Devon, as the tenant of Mrs. Rosamund Mary Rose (neé Rosamund de Trafford), at a rent of 'one peppercorn a year (if demanded)'. After the death of her landlady in 1958, Velthams was bought at auction in 1960 by the writer Oliver Stonor, who had known Alyse previously; they were both present at local celebrations in East Chaldon on 7th or 8th May, 1945, for the end of the War in Europe, which took the form of a large bonfire near the Five Marys, a local group of prehistoric barrows. In her last years, many friends visited her, in spite of the rural isolation of Morebath, which had a railway station until 1966. Alyse had long been an advocate of voluntary euthanasia, and planned her departure from this life. She took a lethal overdose in 1967, and was cremated in Taunton, Somerset. Her last visitor was the historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliffe.

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).

The Sundial Press ( [http://www.sundialpress.co.uk] ) reissue Gregory's third novel, "Hester Craddock", at the end of January 2007 with a new introduction by Barabara Ozieblo.