Second paragraph of third chapter:
Edith was “sent away” in 1903 at the age of fourteen by Mrs. Jane Bratt, her grandmother, to be a boarder at Dresden House in Evesham, Warwickshire (TFA 27). While the Tolkien children do not say why Edith was “sent away” by her grandmother, the most likely reasons were she and the rest of the Bratt family did not want the responsibility of raising Edith (Simpson 148) nor any contact with an illegitimate child, who might raise questions in other people’s minds about the family’s respectability. Edith’s being an heiress did not remove these compelling considerations. By sending Edith to a boarding school, Mrs. Jane Bratt would both further Edith’s education and remove her from the Birmingham area, sparing the family any further shame. The thirty-mile trip from Birmingham to Evesham would have required approximately two hours on an Edwardian train, given train speed and the time needed to stop at other local stations.²
²”At the beginning of the twentieth-century railroads had an average speed of 40 mph.” “The development of the railway network in Britain 1825-1911.” Dan Bogart, Lee Shaw-Taylor and Xuesheng You, last viewed on 6/4/2020. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/beca/ ae2e1cf76dca3ecc5a252d529e583806ecec.pdf.
Back in 2020, I read an earlier version of this, and I wrote:
This fascinating 185-page article about Edith Bratt, wife of J.R.R. Tolkien, was published online by the Journal of Tolkien Studies a couple of weeks ago, almost immediately withdrawn, I guess because the presentation was marred by some editing and formatting errors, and then republished with one of the original authors removed. There’s probably a story there, but it’s none of my business. I read it over an insomniac night, and it did not help me to go back to sleep. It’s a scholarly article rather than a monograph, but I am counting it as a book anyway.
Most Tolkien fans will be familiar with the received version of the history of the writer and his wife (as depicted in the recent film starring Lily Collins as Edith, which incidentally I loved). They met as teenage orphaned lodgers in Birmingham; she was a couple of years older, and a Protestant; Tolkien’s guardian, a Catholic priest, forbade him to have any further contact with her until he reached the age of 21 in 1913; when he got back in touch she was engaged to someone else, but broke it off to be with him and they married in 1916, just before he was posted to France for war duty. You may have seen the recent biopic, which I watched on my last transatlantic flight (and enjoyed).
When I reviewed John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War, I commented that “I would like to know more about the effect of Tolkien’s relationship with his wife Edith, who he was courting and marrying at this time [the war years], on his writing. Perhaps there is little to say, or to be discovered.” Well, it turns out that there was plenty to be discovered and to say.
Bunting looks in intense geographical and genealogical detail at Edith’s Midlands background. She was the daughter of a businessman and his wife’s maid; much of her childhood and early adult life revolved around evading the stigma of illegitimacy (she did not even tell Tolkien until after they were married) but she also inherited her father’s fortune and so was able to support Tolkien during their early married life, until his academic career took off.
The authors make a compelling argument that previous writers (notably Carpenter and Garth) have neglected the importance for Tolkien’s life and writing of Edith and their relationship, concentrating instead on his male friends. Indeed, my father, commenting on Carpenter’s biography, wrote in 1980:
…the relationship between Tolkien & his wife begins romantically, in their waiting 3 years for each other. Yet she wasn’t really suited to be a don’s wife. She disliked his friendship w CS Lewis, & he evidently told her to lump it. She was happy only at the v. end, when they lived in Bournemouth. Yet through it all he was fond of her – & presumably she of him, tho’ the author doesn’t offer evidence on this.
Thanks to their research, it becomes clear just how important the early separation from Edith, and their reunion, were for Tolkien’s creativity, and how his emotional state translates into his early work (seeing Warwick – of all places! – as a mythical city). There are some other fascinating insights as well – his mother’s mental lapses in the final stages of her illness perhaps informing some of the depictions of dissociation in Tolkien’s work; also a reference to someone else’s research on the inspiration for the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith. Also this led me to the research of Seamus Hamill-Keays on the Welsh inspiration for Buckland.
The whole thing is forensically researched and illustrated. Utterly absorbing if you are interested in Tolkien, and I think probably even if you are not you’ll find it a nice piece of biographical research on the life of a young woman born at the end of the nineteenth century.
Edited to add: The revised version of the article has also been withdrawn from the Journal of Tolkien Studies website. I hope it will reappear in some form someday.
I’m glad to say that the following year, 2021, it was properly published in the Cormarë series of Tolkieniana, with I think a bit more circumstantial detail and a delightful reconstruction of the episode where Edith danced for her husband in the woods at Dent’s Garth in 1917. It’s well worth getting if you want to see the most important feminine influences on Tolkien, whose story tends to get told in male terms.
It’s not perfect – the writing style is a tad clunky and in places repetitive, and it ends with an odd fixation on Tolkien’s knowledge of Sanskrit – of course he knew some, he was a philologist; but that doesn’t mean it was quite at the forefront of his mind all the time. But for Tolkienists, whether dilettantes like me or more serious folks, it’s a great read. You can get The Gallant Edith Bratt here.
