| Admin History | Alyse Gregory (18821967) was born at Norwalk in Connecticut. She spent some of her early years in Europe, particularly in Paris where she trained to be a professional singer with Katherine Tanner Fisk. On returning to the United States became involved in local politics and the womans suffrage movement. She became a leader in the Conneticut Woman Sugffrage Association and later an organiser for the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association. In New York she began contributing articles to The Freeman, The New Republic and The Dial, becoming editor of The Dial in 1924. That same year she married the 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 Powyss death from TB in Switzerland in 1939, Gregory continued to live near East Chaldon with his sisters Gertrude and Philippa Powys. She had a circle of friends that included many eminent writers of the day, including Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Malcolm Elwin and Sylvia Townsend Warner. She promoted Llewelyn's work and reputation, while continuing to contribute her own articles to a variety of journals up until the late 1950s. In 1957 she moved to Devon where she died in 1967 by lethal overdose, having been a lifelong advocate of voluntary euthanasia. Excerpts from Gregory's diaries were published posthumously in 1973 under the title The Cry of a Gull. |