Patterns on the Sand

by Gamel Woolsey

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.

164 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Gamel Woolsey (May 28, 1895 – January 18, 1968) was an American poet and novelist.

Woolsey, primarily a poet, published very little in her lifetime: Middle Earth, a collection of 36 poems, came out in 1931, Death's Other Kingdom in 1939 (re-released as "Malaga Burning" in 1998 by Pythia Press) and Spanish Fairy Stories in 1944. Her Collected Poems have been published since her death. Patterns on the Sand (published by The Sundial Press in 2012) recalls her South Carolina childhood; One Way of Love, accepted by Gollancz in 1930 but suppressed at the last minute because of its sexual explicitness, was published by Virago Press in 1987. She died in Spain in 1968 of cancer, and is buried at the English Cemetery, Malaga.

(from Wikipedia)