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One Way of Love
1987 Penguin Virago Modern Classics. Inside shows some tanning
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 26, 1987
133 people want to read
About the author
Gamel Woolsey
14 books3 followersGamel 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)
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)
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August 6, 2020
Sonnet by Gamel Woolsey
When I am dead and laid at last to rest,
Let them not bury me in holy ground –
To lie the shipwrecked sailor cast ashore –
But give the corpse to fire, to flood, to air,
The elements that may the flesh transform
To soar with birds, to float where fishes are,
To rise in smoke, shine in a leaping flame –
To be in freedom lost in nothingness,
Not garnered in the grave, hoarded by death.
What is remembrance that we crave for it?
Let me be nothing then, not face nor name;
As on the seagull wings where bright seas pour,
As air that quickens at the opened door:
When I am dead, let me be nothing more.
Gamel Woolsey was an American poet and novelist who most people will never have heard of and her story is poignant. She was born in South Carolina in 1895. Following family bereavements she moved to New York hoping to be an actress or writer. Her first poem was published in 1922. She met and married Rex Hunter, a journalist from New Zealand in 1923. One Way of Love is an account of their marriage and separation. In 1927 she met John Cowper Powys whilst living in Greenwich Village and through him, his brother Llewelyn and his wife Alyse Gregory (another interesting character). Gamel had an intense affair with Llewelyn and remained lifelong friends with Alyse Gregory. Woolsey moved to England in the late 1920s and met Gerald Brenan with whom she spent the rest of her life, mostly in Spain. Brenan was part of Bloomsbury.
This is Woolsey’s first novel and it is rather good; written in the early 30s, it was ready to be published in 1932. She had showed the draft to Brennan who professed to be impressed by it. David Garnett and Frances Partridge both thought it was wonderful and the publisher Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish. However the prosecution of The Well of Loneliness had made people cautious and at the last minute Gollancz halted the publication because of the novel’s sexual explicitness. The print run was destroyed and Woolsey kept a couple of copies for herself. It was not published in her lifetime. On her death Brenan sent a copy to the British Museum explaining the background and pretty much saying it had no literary merit; entirely untrue and very much a betrayal. Virago (bless them) published in 1987, over 50 years after the first intended publication.
The novel is not explicit in the way that modern audiences would understand the word. There is a consideration of female arousal and orgasm which would have been unusual at that time, but it is more an analysis of the emotions and experience rather than a physical description. Woolsey tries to analyze what both parties are feeling at the time and how male and female approaches can be on an entirely different wavelength.
The main character Mariana is clearly based on Woolsey herself and much of the novel focuses on her marriage to Alan; her feelings of loneliness and apartness, even in a relationship, the boredom and drudgery and the bullying. It isn’t a one sided description and Woolsey carefully describes the positives and negatives; but the reader is left in no doubt that we can never really know the core of another, in essence we are alone. After leaving Alan, Mariana has two brief affairs towards the end of the book. One is with Jack Holworth and this is clearly Llewelyn Powys. Their physical descriptions are very similar and Holworth was the name of the nearest village to Llewelyn’s home in Dorset. When I realized this I began to wonder if the cancellation of publication was really accidental. Jack Holworth in his first sexual encounter with Mariana, rapes her. She doesn’t physically fight him, but she is unwilling and unhappy. He is entirely wrapped up in his own urges and his own perception of her and does not see her unwillingness and the fact that she might not be consenting does not cross his mind. Even more powerfully and explosively;
“Mariana attracts you so much because she is decently grown up, has even been married so that your desires are possible and lawful, and yet you can think of her as a child who could be raped – without really hurting her.”
Woolsey analyses the thoughts of all the men Mariana has relationships with, the otherness of them and their thoughts about her. Jack Holworth's motives are made clear above. Alan is interested in the idea of being in love, but his ideal of what Mariana should be is not matched by her reality. Mariana ends the book alone and her thoughts are summed up;
“Happy — I will never be happy with anyone … In all our crazy, twisted, besotted heads there's nothing with which to make people happy. I am as bad as the rest. I am only different in knowing it. They are complacently self-satisfied in the thought that they can make anyone happy — they are sure that they are good, that they are successful. How stupid we are! And how can we help being so? Each one of us is a small bit of animated consciousness enclosed in a bone case, separated by air and space from its fellows with no way of knowing what goes on in any other mind”
Mariana is pessimistic about the ability of men to meet her needs while hoping to meet one that will. This is a work of brutal honesty, which at its heart is about loneliness; there is a lyrical quality about it, which you would expect from a poet. It is remarkably good, especially for a first novel. The sonnet I began with has a prescience as Woolsey was written out of Llewelyn Powys’s autobiography; her first novel was almost lost and only rescued by the good offices of Virago Press. Her second volume of poetry was rejected by T S Eliot and as she became older Woolsey retreated increasingly into the past as her literary ambitions were thwarted (although she did write an account of the civil war in Spain as it affected her village).
Some lines of her poetry sum it up;
“Oh, must we always live
with the fixed past?
Is there no future
in which we can alter the sunken day”
Gamel Woolsey was destined to be defined by the men around her when she should have been an author in her own right and judging by this novel, would have gone on to write a great deal more. Here we have a truly buried author, deliberately buried and just the sort of writer I hoped I would find when I set out on the Summer of Reading Women challenge.
When I am dead and laid at last to rest,
Let them not bury me in holy ground –
To lie the shipwrecked sailor cast ashore –
But give the corpse to fire, to flood, to air,
The elements that may the flesh transform
To soar with birds, to float where fishes are,
To rise in smoke, shine in a leaping flame –
To be in freedom lost in nothingness,
Not garnered in the grave, hoarded by death.
What is remembrance that we crave for it?
Let me be nothing then, not face nor name;
As on the seagull wings where bright seas pour,
As air that quickens at the opened door:
When I am dead, let me be nothing more.
Gamel Woolsey was an American poet and novelist who most people will never have heard of and her story is poignant. She was born in South Carolina in 1895. Following family bereavements she moved to New York hoping to be an actress or writer. Her first poem was published in 1922. She met and married Rex Hunter, a journalist from New Zealand in 1923. One Way of Love is an account of their marriage and separation. In 1927 she met John Cowper Powys whilst living in Greenwich Village and through him, his brother Llewelyn and his wife Alyse Gregory (another interesting character). Gamel had an intense affair with Llewelyn and remained lifelong friends with Alyse Gregory. Woolsey moved to England in the late 1920s and met Gerald Brenan with whom she spent the rest of her life, mostly in Spain. Brenan was part of Bloomsbury.
This is Woolsey’s first novel and it is rather good; written in the early 30s, it was ready to be published in 1932. She had showed the draft to Brennan who professed to be impressed by it. David Garnett and Frances Partridge both thought it was wonderful and the publisher Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish. However the prosecution of The Well of Loneliness had made people cautious and at the last minute Gollancz halted the publication because of the novel’s sexual explicitness. The print run was destroyed and Woolsey kept a couple of copies for herself. It was not published in her lifetime. On her death Brenan sent a copy to the British Museum explaining the background and pretty much saying it had no literary merit; entirely untrue and very much a betrayal. Virago (bless them) published in 1987, over 50 years after the first intended publication.
The novel is not explicit in the way that modern audiences would understand the word. There is a consideration of female arousal and orgasm which would have been unusual at that time, but it is more an analysis of the emotions and experience rather than a physical description. Woolsey tries to analyze what both parties are feeling at the time and how male and female approaches can be on an entirely different wavelength.
The main character Mariana is clearly based on Woolsey herself and much of the novel focuses on her marriage to Alan; her feelings of loneliness and apartness, even in a relationship, the boredom and drudgery and the bullying. It isn’t a one sided description and Woolsey carefully describes the positives and negatives; but the reader is left in no doubt that we can never really know the core of another, in essence we are alone. After leaving Alan, Mariana has two brief affairs towards the end of the book. One is with Jack Holworth and this is clearly Llewelyn Powys. Their physical descriptions are very similar and Holworth was the name of the nearest village to Llewelyn’s home in Dorset. When I realized this I began to wonder if the cancellation of publication was really accidental. Jack Holworth in his first sexual encounter with Mariana, rapes her. She doesn’t physically fight him, but she is unwilling and unhappy. He is entirely wrapped up in his own urges and his own perception of her and does not see her unwillingness and the fact that she might not be consenting does not cross his mind. Even more powerfully and explosively;
“Mariana attracts you so much because she is decently grown up, has even been married so that your desires are possible and lawful, and yet you can think of her as a child who could be raped – without really hurting her.”
Woolsey analyses the thoughts of all the men Mariana has relationships with, the otherness of them and their thoughts about her. Jack Holworth's motives are made clear above. Alan is interested in the idea of being in love, but his ideal of what Mariana should be is not matched by her reality. Mariana ends the book alone and her thoughts are summed up;
“Happy — I will never be happy with anyone … In all our crazy, twisted, besotted heads there's nothing with which to make people happy. I am as bad as the rest. I am only different in knowing it. They are complacently self-satisfied in the thought that they can make anyone happy — they are sure that they are good, that they are successful. How stupid we are! And how can we help being so? Each one of us is a small bit of animated consciousness enclosed in a bone case, separated by air and space from its fellows with no way of knowing what goes on in any other mind”
Mariana is pessimistic about the ability of men to meet her needs while hoping to meet one that will. This is a work of brutal honesty, which at its heart is about loneliness; there is a lyrical quality about it, which you would expect from a poet. It is remarkably good, especially for a first novel. The sonnet I began with has a prescience as Woolsey was written out of Llewelyn Powys’s autobiography; her first novel was almost lost and only rescued by the good offices of Virago Press. Her second volume of poetry was rejected by T S Eliot and as she became older Woolsey retreated increasingly into the past as her literary ambitions were thwarted (although she did write an account of the civil war in Spain as it affected her village).
Some lines of her poetry sum it up;
“Oh, must we always live
with the fixed past?
Is there no future
in which we can alter the sunken day”
Gamel Woolsey was destined to be defined by the men around her when she should have been an author in her own right and judging by this novel, would have gone on to write a great deal more. Here we have a truly buried author, deliberately buried and just the sort of writer I hoped I would find when I set out on the Summer of Reading Women challenge.
December 14, 2015
A wonderful book which, though written in 1931-2, remained in proof form for 50 years unable to find a publisher. Virago, god bless them, brought it into print for the first time in 1987.
Quite shockingly modern, particularly in its treatment of female desire, rape and abortion. Well worth tracking down.
Quite shockingly modern, particularly in its treatment of female desire, rape and abortion. Well worth tracking down.
March 20, 2016
“It should have been so gay,” she said. “And it was so ugly.”As noted in the introduction, the novel was originally to be titled Innocence, which might be more appropriate than its current title (not to say it's currently title is not appropriate, I just feel the original speaks to the text as a whole to a greater extent). But the "innocence" of the original title should evoke both fairy tales and naivety; it is a state that should not last into adulthood, and is an anomaly when it does, almost always setting its bearer apart. And that likely sounds cynical; so be it, I suppose it is. But I also believe that was the way Woolsey intended it - but it is clearly also irrevocably bound together with a tender pity; with painful, longing sadness that the state cannot last
Mariana’s vague secret dream about love was to have one lover, to love only one person all her life, in one human relation to give all the small gifts of her withdrawn shy nature. To live with one man always, to have his children, to die and be buried with him. She would have been ashamed to express so common and simple a wish. She was hardly sufficiently conscious of it to express it. She had a curious fear that if she were not to find a lover she would be lonely in another world as well as in this : with an eternal loneliness.The book focuses on Mariana, a recently orphaned woman who has just moved to New York City, with a small pension, and additional revenue coming from her writing. The book - both in its brief opening section and at the beginning of "part one" - finds her alone, which - entangled with a state of loneliness - is both a theme and a focus of the novel. Mariana carries with her a reserved childlike innocence - it's an innocence this belongs to a different age, as noted by an editor commenting on the presence of unicorns in her poetry - which sets her apart, especially in her interactions with men, even more specifically with men who desire her. The book is exacting in its use of language, and the shifts from luminosity to darkness are sudden and unsettling, and Woolsey pulls no punches with her readers, even when some of the language and descriptions are veiled; more a sign of the time this was written than evidence of any sort of timidity on the author's part.
Books like these are why I love my time here on Good Reads; the resources I peruse never focus on the Virago imprint (I likely should seek out additional resources), but a brief time back on GR brought it to my attention, and here we are.
This book is excellent, and deserves a greater reader base than the paltry numbers presently showing for read/reviewed. Through its measured and deliberate use of language, it's well drawn and nuanced characters, and its melancholy but longingly wistful tone, this book excels.
“This,” she thought, “ is one of the hours you have to pass through as best you may. There is nothing to be got from it, no interest, no enrichment of any sort. You live through it and feel it as little as you can. It is essentially evil and unfortunate. You are caught in it for an hour or longer, it may be. There is nothing to be done but live it out.”
November 2, 2020
A frank and intimate account of the disappointing and claustrophobic nature of marriage in the early Twentieth Century. The protagonist, Mariana Clare, is described several times as more elfin, and unusual looking, than conventional beauty and I think her otherworldliness highlights her need for more freedom than the trappings of marriage and cohabitation can offer.
I enjoyed reading of Mariana´s determination to carve out her own path and find her own independent living space.
The descriptions of and the relationship Mariana has with nature is also beautiful.
I'm so grateful to Virago for publishing Woolsey´s novel 50 years after it was written in 1987 and that I discovered it in a second hand bookshop many years after that; a wonderful discovery.
I enjoyed reading of Mariana´s determination to carve out her own path and find her own independent living space.
The descriptions of and the relationship Mariana has with nature is also beautiful.
I'm so grateful to Virago for publishing Woolsey´s novel 50 years after it was written in 1987 and that I discovered it in a second hand bookshop many years after that; a wonderful discovery.
September 14, 2017
After the death of her grandmother and guardian, Mariana Clare moves from South Carolina to New York City. Secured by a “small income” she sets about seeking to have her poetry published. At a newspaper office she meets Sigrid Armstrong, who takes her on a walk through the city’s “Jewish quarter”. From this point through most of the rest of the novel Mariana is a mainly passive person, taken by friends to various parties and performances, staying home otherwise. She has sex with and then marries the first man who persistently courts her despite her seeming indifference. This passivity is hinted at in a prologue, but seems rather surprising in light of her drive in moving north and seeking publication.
There are a number of well done scenes in the book, evocative descriptions of events and places, among them the song of a Harlem chanteuse, the fog and traffic of London, the landscape of England’s west country, and an artists’ costume party / picnic in the Catskills. But these seem like a series of events without a sense of progression, stages of neither an education nor a pilgrimage.
There are some interesting psychological moments. At one point, Mariana thinks about her husband Alan, "he was like a perverse Peter Pan who could not bear to grow up." (169) This may be the earliest use of Barrie's creation in naming this male behavior. At another point, Alan thinks of Mariana as neurotic, but this is primarily projection on his part as, later in the book he displays the most neurotic behavior, simultaneously not wanting a child but secretly criticizing Mariana for not wanting to bear his child.
Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in the book occurs the night before Mariana enters the hospital. She goes to a Russian restaurant with a friend, Jack Hasty; it is nominally an anniversary celebration but at the last moment Alan refuses to attend. She performs a kind of aria while listening to a balalaika orchestra and looking at the restaurant's decorative paper lanterns:
This novel was printed in proof in 1930, but not published until 1987, having been withdrawn by the publisher, supposedly for fear of prosecution for obscenity. Readers looking “for something scandalous to read on the train” had nevertheless better look elsewhere, as it’s hard to see what might have been considered obscene in this novel, even in the 1930s.The word “lesbians” occurs once, an unnamed character in one scene is in the hospital due to an illegal abortion, birth control is practiced though referred to so vaguely it is hard to tell whether it involves a physical apparatus or some obscure mental discipline, sexual intercourse occurs frequently but is described in vague terms, often by the confusing euphemism “embraces”, the heroine has one verified orgasm, though after the first additional ones are occasionally, but infrequently, hinted at.
Perhaps the most obscene events in the book go almost unremarked by the heroine, and I suspect would not have raised any prosecutorial ire at the time. Modern readers will unequivocally see several sexual encounters in this book as constituting rape, though neither author nor character use the term and I found it difficult to tell whether they would have shared anything like today’s attitude about the incidents. Certainly the heroine does not avoid the men after these incidents (Reader, she married one!) and the act of crossing the line into rape seems almost an abstract problem of weights and measures: the woman’s disinclination is not as strong as the man’s insistence, and he therefore gets his way without dealing blows or issuing threats.
Since I complained that in Stoner John Williams never indicated that the books the protagonist read and devoted his life to contributed to his outlook on life, I will say here that Woolsey presents Mariana’s perceptions as undoubtedly those of a person who is a dedicated reader and who makes her readings a part of her mental furniture. I don’t want to suggest that the novel is packed with literary allusions, but they occur regularly in relevant contexts. Here are three examples:
There are a number of well done scenes in the book, evocative descriptions of events and places, among them the song of a Harlem chanteuse, the fog and traffic of London, the landscape of England’s west country, and an artists’ costume party / picnic in the Catskills. But these seem like a series of events without a sense of progression, stages of neither an education nor a pilgrimage.
There are some interesting psychological moments. At one point, Mariana thinks about her husband Alan, "he was like a perverse Peter Pan who could not bear to grow up." (169) This may be the earliest use of Barrie's creation in naming this male behavior. At another point, Alan thinks of Mariana as neurotic, but this is primarily projection on his part as, later in the book he displays the most neurotic behavior, simultaneously not wanting a child but secretly criticizing Mariana for not wanting to bear his child.
Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in the book occurs the night before Mariana enters the hospital. She goes to a Russian restaurant with a friend, Jack Hasty; it is nominally an anniversary celebration but at the last moment Alan refuses to attend. She performs a kind of aria while listening to a balalaika orchestra and looking at the restaurant's decorative paper lanterns:
“These lanterns are, almost of all things I have seen,” she said, “the most perfect symbol of man’s pathetic evening gaiety. They glow like artificial man-created moons, they tear if you touch them, and catch fire and char and are spoiled; they shine with all our longing for gaiety, for romance which is unattainable. We have cried for the moon and they have given us a paper lantern.”This would be rather heavy-handed in retrospect if it proved to be some sort of foreshadowing – but it is not; it is simply a moment of poetry at a stressful and uncertain moment in the story.
Hasty caught her half articulate feeling. “Yes,” he said, “other things from the same evanescent country are toy balloons – so light on the air and so brightly coloured. They escape and go rising out of sight, or they break. Many a child must have had its first inkling of the nature of the world when a toy balloon burst in its face.”
“Bubbles are different,” Mariana went on, speaking from some almost unconscious depth whose images floated up to the surface because her physical weakness thinned the barriers between the regions of her mind, between the dreamer and the waker.
“Do you remember how a bubble appears just before it breaks, how the colours grow deeper and brighter, and gradually begin to swim around and around its surface, faster and faster, until suddenly it breaks and they are gone, and there is nothing but a spray of tiny drops in your face and a little water in your hand? But it never was sad. The turning colour was a consummation, and it was complete when the bubble broke: then you blew a new one and it all began again.
“What extraordinary happiness bubbles gave you when they rose up over the wall and disappeared into the sky! but almost more – I don’t know why – when they fell if you were blowing them from some high place, from a balcony, or out of a window. They fell towards the ground so lightly, so slowly, in a kind of miracle, as if they would go on falling for ever, descending, world after world.” (204-206)
This novel was printed in proof in 1930, but not published until 1987, having been withdrawn by the publisher, supposedly for fear of prosecution for obscenity. Readers looking “for something scandalous to read on the train” had nevertheless better look elsewhere, as it’s hard to see what might have been considered obscene in this novel, even in the 1930s.The word “lesbians” occurs once, an unnamed character in one scene is in the hospital due to an illegal abortion, birth control is practiced though referred to so vaguely it is hard to tell whether it involves a physical apparatus or some obscure mental discipline, sexual intercourse occurs frequently but is described in vague terms, often by the confusing euphemism “embraces”, the heroine has one verified orgasm, though after the first additional ones are occasionally, but infrequently, hinted at.
Perhaps the most obscene events in the book go almost unremarked by the heroine, and I suspect would not have raised any prosecutorial ire at the time. Modern readers will unequivocally see several sexual encounters in this book as constituting rape, though neither author nor character use the term and I found it difficult to tell whether they would have shared anything like today’s attitude about the incidents. Certainly the heroine does not avoid the men after these incidents (Reader, she married one!) and the act of crossing the line into rape seems almost an abstract problem of weights and measures: the woman’s disinclination is not as strong as the man’s insistence, and he therefore gets his way without dealing blows or issuing threats.
Since I complained that in Stoner John Williams never indicated that the books the protagonist read and devoted his life to contributed to his outlook on life, I will say here that Woolsey presents Mariana’s perceptions as undoubtedly those of a person who is a dedicated reader and who makes her readings a part of her mental furniture. I don’t want to suggest that the novel is packed with literary allusions, but they occur regularly in relevant contexts. Here are three examples:
There was a butcher’s stall almost opposite, and the butcher owned a large, middle-aged white bull terrier – the kind of dog that Bill Sikes has in Cruikshank’s illustrations for Oliver Twist (117)In the hospital before surgery:
She remembered a sentence from Llewelyn Powys’ Skin for Skin. “It is only very rarely that even the most clear sighted of us grasp the actual terms of our existence, each tremulous, intellectual soul being set shockingly apart to endure as best it may its own destruction.” (210)And the most surprising to me, when Mariana retrospectively outsources to Molly Bloom her reaction to losing her virginity.
Long afterwards when she read Ulysses she was to recognize for the first time what something in her sad, young mind kept saying as she stiffened her body and bit her lips not to struggle or cry out against the strangeness and the pain. For the small, wise voice of her mind kept saying sadly – “It might as well be he. It might as well be he.” (56)Gamel Woolsey was half-sister to Justice John M. Woolsey whose opinion in The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses” used to appear (does it still?) at the front of US copies of Joyce’s novel.
March 8, 2023
Yet another book where the rating system fails me.
To be clear, this book is probably the most depressing book I’ve read in a while, maybe the most depressing book I’ve ever read. But it was also one of the most masterful books I have ever read. But I’m not sure I’d read this again.
The book is a psychological look in to many of women’s problems, particularly in relations with men. It explored sex, love, pregnancy, identity, even abortion which I was so shocked with out of a classic.
What really stood out to me as the main theme of this book was loneliness. It was about being surrounded by people who make little effort to connect to you or ascertain your needs, and how that deepens your connection to yourself yet how lonely that could be.
I can’t really but all of my thoughts into words right now but I have a feeling this is gonna grow on me and I quite frankly can’t believe this book isn’t talked about more. I don’t understand why booktubers go on about the same 5 classics when there are so many lesser known and underrated classics out there.
To be clear, this book is probably the most depressing book I’ve read in a while, maybe the most depressing book I’ve ever read. But it was also one of the most masterful books I have ever read. But I’m not sure I’d read this again.
The book is a psychological look in to many of women’s problems, particularly in relations with men. It explored sex, love, pregnancy, identity, even abortion which I was so shocked with out of a classic.
What really stood out to me as the main theme of this book was loneliness. It was about being surrounded by people who make little effort to connect to you or ascertain your needs, and how that deepens your connection to yourself yet how lonely that could be.
I can’t really but all of my thoughts into words right now but I have a feeling this is gonna grow on me and I quite frankly can’t believe this book isn’t talked about more. I don’t understand why booktubers go on about the same 5 classics when there are so many lesser known and underrated classics out there.
March 6, 2020
4,5 stars. My review: https://theblankgarden.com/2020/03/06...
September 30, 2016
I feel very ambivalent about this book. It's the story of a Southern Belle plagued by fragile health who moves to Greenwich village in search of Love and possibly, literary fame. Having married the first guy who asks her, she doesn't feel fulfilled. For a while the couple shuttles between New York city and the Catskills, with a stint in London and a wonderful holiday in Cornwall, which gives rise to splendid descriptions of the English countryside and its people. Mariana's husband, who is a journalist, is crazy about her sexually, and in his own way, loves her at least as much as she loves him. However, they aren't happy, and eventually she leaves him. After that, she takes 2 lovers in close succession, or rather lets herself be taken by them, and we are left with the impression that the cycle will repeat itself until she dies in childbirth or from tuberculosis. Mariana is no nymphomaniac, far from it. Although she comes to enjoy sex when the man puts himself out to pleasure her, she fails to see why men want it so often, and accommodates them more out of curtesy than desire. Strange as it may sound, she comes out as somebody who seems to have decided than in the 1920s, the kind of hospitality a Southern lady should extend is sexual - and since in fact she only has a small allowance to live on, she can't really entertain in any other fashion. But somehow, she fails to connect with the guys who are attracted to her, and the lack of true love gnaws at her. On the one hand, I was irritated by Mariana's passivity and vague longings. It's yet another of those books where the heroine pines for Love as the be all and end all, with the predictable result that she finds life more and more of a trial and a disappointment. And yet, there is more to it than that. Woolsey beautifully conveys the way Mariana sleepwalks through life not by choice, but because she is one of these people for whom life is, so too speak, not quite real. Even when she has to have an abortion, because Alan doesn't want a child, and neither does she, she behaves in an oddly genteel way, which surprises the medical staff: "They were used to the timidly nervous and the stoically calm, but this strange young woman, they realized, was genuinely indifferent. She was anxious not to give trouble and to make the occasion a pleasant one for them, nothing more." In a way, she submits to the abortion with the same misplaced sense of decorum as she submits to sex. Not a great novel, but a strangely affecting curio.
September 4, 2023
This book was published under unusual and sad circumstances and for that reason I would give this book a higher rating than I normally would. The writing was not all that good although in a couple of places it really shined.
The sad circumstances are that this book should have been published in 1932, two years after Gamel Woolsey had received the page proofs from the publishing house Gollancz.
From the Introduction of the book written by Shena Mackay (1985):
• Several police prosecutions for alleged obscenity, the most notorious of which was that of Radclyffe Hall’s pioneering lesbian novel, ‘The Well of Loneliness’ (1928), had made publishers jittery in the 1930s, and Gollancz, who had accepted this novel, were understandably wary after the court case involving another of their publications, the novel ‘Children Be Happy’, based on Christa Winsloe’s play, “Gestern Und Heute, which was made into the tragic and touching film Maedchen In Uniform. Gamel Woolsey’s novel does contain passing references to lesbianism: its young heroine, who has read of “perverse loves” in Greek and Roman literature, is puzzled to discover that such relationships are enjoyed by women too.
This book was published by Virago Press Limited in 1987, some 55 years later than it should have been published and by then Ms. Woolsey was dead. The book was semi-autobiographical...as examples, Woolsey had marital troubles with her first husband, and she has tuberculosis as did her character, Mariana.
I did like one passage in the book a lot — it resonated with me:
• Each one of us a small bit of animated consciousness enclosed in a bone case, separated by space and air from its fellows with no way of knowing what goes on in any another’s mind. (It’s probably much what goes on in one’s own—but it is impossible to be certain.) Queer sounds are all we have to deal with, hot breaths of air of symbolic length shaped by a bit of pointed flesh and clutching teeth to particular syllables. These are all we have to tell us what a man thinks. (JimZ: Sort of like Gordon Lightfoot’s title of his famous song: “If You Could Read My Mind”...i.e., who knows what the others in this universe are thinking...anyway......I liked it!)
Synopsis taken from back cover of the Virago Modern Classics issue:
• Gamel Woolsey’s startling novel about a woman’s emotional and physical needs has for more than 50 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. (JimZ: There was use contraception in the book on the part of the female, ) It is now published for the first time. At once graceful and naïve, 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 21, 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.
Reviews:
• Very informative and most interesting review! http://lostmag.matthewbrian.com/issue...
• http://www.writewords.org.uk/forum/90...
Note:
• A biography of hers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamel_W...
The sad circumstances are that this book should have been published in 1932, two years after Gamel Woolsey had received the page proofs from the publishing house Gollancz.
From the Introduction of the book written by Shena Mackay (1985):
• Several police prosecutions for alleged obscenity, the most notorious of which was that of Radclyffe Hall’s pioneering lesbian novel, ‘The Well of Loneliness’ (1928), had made publishers jittery in the 1930s, and Gollancz, who had accepted this novel, were understandably wary after the court case involving another of their publications, the novel ‘Children Be Happy’, based on Christa Winsloe’s play, “Gestern Und Heute, which was made into the tragic and touching film Maedchen In Uniform. Gamel Woolsey’s novel does contain passing references to lesbianism: its young heroine, who has read of “perverse loves” in Greek and Roman literature, is puzzled to discover that such relationships are enjoyed by women too.
This book was published by Virago Press Limited in 1987, some 55 years later than it should have been published and by then Ms. Woolsey was dead. The book was semi-autobiographical...as examples, Woolsey had marital troubles with her first husband, and she has tuberculosis as did her character, Mariana.
I did like one passage in the book a lot — it resonated with me:
• Each one of us a small bit of animated consciousness enclosed in a bone case, separated by space and air from its fellows with no way of knowing what goes on in any another’s mind. (It’s probably much what goes on in one’s own—but it is impossible to be certain.) Queer sounds are all we have to deal with, hot breaths of air of symbolic length shaped by a bit of pointed flesh and clutching teeth to particular syllables. These are all we have to tell us what a man thinks. (JimZ: Sort of like Gordon Lightfoot’s title of his famous song: “If You Could Read My Mind”...i.e., who knows what the others in this universe are thinking...anyway......I liked it!)
Synopsis taken from back cover of the Virago Modern Classics issue:
• Gamel Woolsey’s startling novel about a woman’s emotional and physical needs has for more than 50 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. (JimZ: There was use contraception in the book on the part of the female, ) It is now published for the first time. At once graceful and naïve, 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 21, 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.
Reviews:
• Very informative and most interesting review! http://lostmag.matthewbrian.com/issue...
• http://www.writewords.org.uk/forum/90...
Note:
• A biography of hers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamel_W...
November 13, 2022
Not a title I was familiar with when I came across this Virago classic but I am glad I picked it up. This is a sad, beautifully written portrait of a marriage destined to fail in the years following WWI. With very little dialogue, Woolsey allows the reader into the minds of Mariana and her husband, Alan, as they navigate their way in a strange new world. The descriptions of the natural environment - particularly of the couple’s time in Cornwall and when Mariana is living alone in a cabin in upstate New York - are sublime.
Written in the late 1920s, it was suppressed by nervous publishers in 1930 because of its sexual explicitness and was only finally published by Virago in 1987.
Written in the late 1920s, it was suppressed by nervous publishers in 1930 because of its sexual explicitness and was only finally published by Virago in 1987.
November 1, 2024
This book was considered too controversial to publish when it was written in 1930 and was not published until 1987. Woolsey left some poetry and another unpublished novel. It is relatively explicit for its time, though certainly not pornographic. The character is a complex one with a very modern approach to relationships. Some of the writing is lovely, some repetitive. I’m glad I found and read this.
June 23, 2025
I did not enjoy reading this book. Mariana (Woolsey) lived a sad and lonely life. I don’t really know what to take away from this book, but maybe that was never the point. Maybe all Woolsey wanted was to accurately describe what her life was like through this vessel of a novel. I probably should have just stuck it out with Jane Auster and our friend Emma.
September 28, 2025
Deeply depressing. 2.5 stars
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