Born: 1868, Ireland
Died: 23 January 1949
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Frances Clarke. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Gyles, Althea (1868–1949), poet and artist, was born in Kilmurry, Co. Waterford. Her father, George Gyles, came from a well-connected Anglo-Irish family, who, according to W. B. Yeats, were ‘so haughty that their neighbours called them the Royal Family’ (Colman, 104); her mother, Alithea Emma Gyles, was the daughter of Edward Grey, bishop of Hereford. In 1889 Althea and her family moved to Dublin, where she studied art. During this period she appears to have become associated with the theosophical movement, in particular the group that based itself at 3 Ely Place. She is also thought to have contributed articles to the Irish Theosophist. By 1892 she had left Dublin for London, where she resumed her study of art, initially at Pedders and from 1893 at the Slade School of Fine Art, while continuing to pursue her interest in the mystical through her association with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She also mixed with London literati, meeting, among others, Oscar Wilde, who had a high opinion of her work. She later provided illustrations for his poem ‘The harlot’s house’.
It was, however, as Yeats’s chosen book designer that she is best remembered. During their brief collaboration she devised neo-Celtic cover designs for The secret rose (1897), Poems (1899), and The wind among the reeds (1899). During this period she also produced a cover design for The idylls of Killyowen (1898) by Father Matthew Russell. Although Yeats included her poem ‘Sympath’ in his selection for the anthology of 1900 by T. W. Rolleston and Stopford Brooke, her recent relationship with the morally dubious bookseller and pornographer Leonard Smithers led to his distancing himself from her; the breakup of the relationship with Smithers resulted in her physical collapse, from which she never entirely recovered. Plagued by financial difficulties, she nevertheless refused to accept assistance from her family. Her friend Cecil French described her as ‘a noble difficult being who invariably became the despair of those who had helped her’ (Colman, 105).
Although she abandoned book design, Gyles continued to write poetry, contributing individual poems to the Saturday Review (September 1900), the arts magazine Kensington (1901), Venture (1905), the Academy (December 1906), and Clifford Bax’s occultist magazine Orpheus (January 1912). She subsequently contributed work to the Peasant Art Guild’s magazine the Vineyard. After a period living in Folkestone (c.1910) and Cornwall, by which time she had added horoscope writing, Buddhism, anti-vivisection, and vegetarianism to her interests, she returned to London. Her later years were spent in poverty. She died in a nursing home at Crystal Palace in 1949. Her papers, which include two unfinished novels, a play and children’s fiction, are in the Reading University Library. The character of Ariadne Berden in Faith Compton Mackenzie’s novel Tatting (1957) is based on her.