Elsa Gidlow

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Elsa Gidlow in 1974
Elsa Gidlow (1898–1986) was a poet, freelance journalist, and philosopher, best known for her book of openly lesbian love poetry, Writing On A Grey Thread (1923).

She was born in Hull, but the family emigrated around 1904 to Canada. She moved to New York in 1920, and in 1928 to California, where she lived for the rest of her life, latterly with her partner Isabel Grenfell Quallo, in a bohemian community called Druid Heights. She had radical views, and was suspected in the 1940s of being a Communist.

Further reading

Elsa, I Come With My Songs: The Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow (San Francisco: Druid Heights Press, 1986)