to return to Paris, live with her, and be trained as a professional singer. She remained in Paris with Mrs Fiske for a year.
She was drawn gradually into public movements because of her interest in social justice. After returning to her home country, she decided to give up her singing ambitions. She became involved in local politics and the
woman suffrage movement for which she was a fearless public speaker. Gregory decided to start a grassroots women's suffrage club in Connecticut, as she explains in her autobiography The Day Is Gone (page 100). The first meeting brought together herself and five other women. Gregory went on to become a key leader in the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association through which she directed activities such as meetings, plays, and parades alongside Cromwell native Emily Miller Pierson. =She later (page 104, op. cit.) worked as assistant state organizer for the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association during a referendum on woman suffrage in 1915 and was also active for the cause in the State of New York
Her first novel, She Shall Have Music was published in 1926, followed by King Log and Lady Lea (1929) and Hester Craddock (1931), both of which were written in Dorset.
She and her husband visited
Berkshire Hills lent to them by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugen Boissevain. From there, they paid a visit to the West Indies. On their return to England, Llewelyn Powys suffered a relapse from an old illness, and in the winter of 1936, they went to Switzerland, where she wrote a book of essays, Wheels on Gravel (1938). In 1956, Alyse presented the author Rosemary Manning with a copy of Wheels on Gravel inscribed with a quotation from George Santayana: 'To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation, to elude oneself is the romantic'.[4]
. 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,
Second World 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 own. She took a lethal overdose on 27 August 1967, and was cremated in Taunton, Somerset. Her last visitor on the day of her death was the author Rosemary Manning who described the visit in her autobiography A Corridor of Mirrors.[5]
Legacy
Excerpts from Gregory's diaries were published in 1973 under the title The Cry of a Gull.[6]
In 1999, Alyse Gregory: A Woman at her Window[7] by Jacqueline Peltier was published (London, Cecil Woolf).
The Sundial Press[8] reissued Gregory's third novel, Hester Craddock, at the end of January 2007 with a new introduction by Barbara Ozieblo.
