Gamel Woolsey, author of ‘Death’s Other Kingdom: A Spanish village on the eve
of the Civil War’. Read Michael Jacob’s afterword to this remarkable first-hand
account of the Spanish Civil War.
‘Of all the foreign eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War, Gamel Woolsey’s
Death’s Other Kingdom is one of the most moving and unusual. It is one of the few
records of the war that is fuelled more by a love of Spain and its people than by
any firm ideological standpoint. Woolsey was someone whose political position
ran contrary to the Left Review’s famous assertion of 1937 that it was impossible
for authors not to take sides on the issue of being for or against Franco and
Fascism. But then, to her contemporaries, she would barely have been
considered an author at all. By the time of her death in 1968, she seemed
destined to go down in history merely as the wife of the writer and Hispanist
Gerald Brenan … Rereading the book today, one is struck by how pertinent it
remains as a commentary on war in general, and on war’s impact on the lives of
those ordinary human beings whom the rhetoric of politics and ideology never
reaches.’ Michael Jacobs