Alyse Gregory (1884–1967)

Alyse Gregory was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, to a prosperous old American family. She showed a gift for music at an early age and was sent to Paris at age 15 to train as a professional singer. However, on returning to the USA, she became involved in local politics and the women's suffrage movement. She founded a local women's suffrage club and was also active for the cause in New York and New Jersey. After World War I, she moved to New York City, where she supported herself as a copywriter in an ad agency, and later as a freelance writer. She formed close friendships with a circle of young artists and writers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Stephen Vincent Benét, Theodore Dreiser, Marianne Moore and Sylvia Townsend Warner. She wrote articles for publications such as The New Republic and The Dial, one of the most prestigious and avant-garde literary magazines of the time. She becoming managing editor of The Dial in 1924. It was through the magazine that she met the English writer Llewelyn Powys. In 1924, they married, and moved to England, where they lived quietly in a cottage on the Dorset coast. Her first novel, She Shall Have Music was published in 1926, followed by King Log and Lady Lea (1929) and Hester Craddock (1931). After some travel in Palestine and the West Indies, they returned to England, where Powys suffered a relapse of his tuberculosis. In 1936, they went to Switzerland for his health, where Alyse wrote a book of essays, Wheels on Gravel (1938).

After Powys died in 1939, Alyse went to live with his sisters, Gertrude and Philippa Powys, and wrote her autobiography The Day Is Gone (1948). She promoted her late husband's reputation while continuing to contribute her own articles to a variety of journals up until the late 1950s.
She committed suicide in 1967. Excerpts from her diaries were published in 1973 under the title The Cry of a Gull. See her biography, Alyse Gregory: A Woman at her Window, by Jacqueline Peltier (1999).