Josepha Frances Gregg

Biography

Frances Gregg was born in America in 1885. She lived with her mother, and they worked as teachers and lecturers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Frances Gregg 21). Her mother, Julia Vanness Gregg, raised Frances among the suffragists and feminists who fought for women’s rights (Gregg 165). Frances was also good friends with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle. Hilda and Frances were best friends, and Gregg traveled with her on a trip to England in 1911. Gregg herself was a writer and poet who belonged to Pound’s Imagist group. She met John Cowper Powys in 1912 in Pennsylvania at one of his lectures (Introduction xv). Powys fell in love with her, but their relationship was complicated do to the fact that he was already married (Frances Gregg 24). To keep her close, he arranged for Gregg to marry his friend Louis Wilkinson, an Englishman. However, Powys kept near-possessive contact with Frances, and this caused serious issues in her marriage with Wilkinson. Although their son Oliver Wilkinson wrote that Louis and Frances loved each other, Wilkinson could no longer stand Cowper’s interference, nor Frances’s determination for her mother to live with them, despite his displeasure (Frances Gregg 30). They divorced, and Frances was left to raise two young children alongside her aging mother. They lived a sort of nomadic life, and Frances herself compared it to the gypsies and the Jews that she met on her travels (Gregg 55). She wrote about her experiences in her memoir, The Mystic Leeway. She tried to make a living off her writing, but they were often poor, and she would spend what money she made on her children. She met a tragic end with her mother and daughter, Betty in the Blitz in 1941 in Plymouth (Frances Gregg 18). Her son Oliver identified their bodies (20).

The New Freewoman was an ongoing periodical in London in 1913. In Volume 1, Number 12, there is a series of short stories collected under the title “Contes Macabres” attributed to a Frances Gregg. Wilkinson wrote that Frances used her maiden name to publish (Frances Gregg 20). By this time, The New Freewoman was heavily associated with Gregg’s friend Ezra Pound, and Hilda Doolittle had also been published in it. There is little evidence to say for sure that “Contes Macabres” was written by Gregg but given the evidence of her friends’ connection to the publication and her own timely arrival in England in 1912 it is possible the stories are hers. There are three short stories that seem to belong together based on their haunting themes. Based on Oliver’s account of his mother, Gregg was no stranger to macabre events, having witnessed lynching and riots in her youth in America. Oliver also shed light on Gregg’s unusual relationship with Cowper Powys, who had manic episodes and sexually sadistic tendencies. However, Wilkinson also noted that neither Gregg nor Cowper Powys were really “macabre creatures” but were actually very caring toward the people they loved (Introduction xxix). These stories, especially “My Case” may reflect Frances’s interest in the macabre, but they are also an early record of the early writings of a strange woman who lived a life according to her own determination.