Background
Gladys Louise Husted Cromwell was born on November 28, 1885 in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Frederic and Esther Whitmore (Husted) Cromwell.
Her father was graduated from Harvard at the age of twenty, a conscientious student and something of a dandy. In his mature life he became very rich, and gave much attention to political reform and to the promotion of music and art.
His tranquil domestic life of forty-one years was broken in 1909 by the death of his wife, and his own death came in 1914. The youngest of his five children were Gladys and her twin sister Dorothea. They were practically inseparable, eagerly devoted to each other throughout their lives.
Education
As girls she and her sister traveled extensively in Europe and attended the Brearley School, a private institution in New York City. Both were concerned with the larger phases of social adjustment, and both were writers, Dorothea chiefly in prose, and Gladys in poetry.
Career
In 1915, Gladys published Gales of Utterance, a collection of admirable but in no sense remarkable verse. The war in Europe from its early stages was considered by both the sisters as unprecedented disaster, a horrid indorsement of philosophies they had long recognized.
Their speculations regarding it were ceaseless, and many of them are recorded in Gladys’s verse in various magazines. The volume Poems (1920), containing nearly everything that she wrote, shows great advance over Gates of Utterance, and some of it has the mark of permanence.
Two of the lyrics, “The Mould” and “The Crowning Gift, ” are little short of magnificent, unique in view-point and apparently final in phraseology, but probably too sophisticated ever to be popular; and “The Deep, ” with its lines “I must have peace, increasing peace, such as dark oceans keep, ” assumes in connection with its author’s death a sorrowful tragicalness.
In January 1918 the two sisters went to France to do Red Cross work. There, near the front, at Chalons-sur- Marne, they remained without relief for eight months, exposed to every harrowing consequence of war and giving comfort and sympathy to any who were in pain or grief.
In January 1919 they took passage for America on the steamer Lorraine, and on the night of the 24th, while the ship was still in the Gironde River making its way seaward, they leapt overboard.
Their bodies were buried in France some months later, with special honors from the French government.
Views
“Her life, ” says one who knew Gladys intimately, “was interior, and the delicate charm of her personality was like a slender wreath of smoke that encircled a deep burning fire” (letter of Anne Dunn).
Personality
In spite of her and her sister wealth they were in a sense personally frugal, and they had the quality of mind which enabled them to be aware at once of stark actuality and poetic mystery.