Aelfrida Tillyard

Aelfrida Catherine Wetenhall Tillyard (5 October 1883 – 12 December 1959) was a British author, medium, lecturer on Comparative Religion and associated religious topics, spiritual advisor and self-styled mystic.

Tillyard was born in Cambridge as the second child and only daughter of local newspaper proprietor/editor Alfred Isaac Tillyard MA and his wife Catharine Sarah née Wetenhall, proponent of higher education for women. Tillyard had 3 brothers, one of whom predeceased her; Henry Julius Wetenhall Tillyard (1881-1968), classicist and expert in Byzantine Musicology, Conrad Francis Wetenhall Tillyard (1885-1888) and Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard (1889-1961), active in English Literature studies and Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. Events surrounding the untimely death of Conrad Francis traumatised Tillyard so deeply that her personality became severely dysfunctional thereafter. (Mann,S. ch2 pp 21–26) Unable to tolerate formal schooling, she was educated privately until 1900 after which she spent a year in Switzerland and several months in Florence to perfect her already-fluent French and Latin. She subsequently taught at 2 Cambridge schools until a breakdown in her physical and mental health ended the teaching career envisaged by her parents.

During her stormy adolescence, Tillyard had undergone several mystico-religious experiences as a result of which she decided to dedicate her life to God's service. Bizarre manifestations of her dedication persuaded her parents that marriage was the only means of normalising her. On 19 January 1907 Tillyard reluctantly married Greco-American Constantine Cleanthes Graham ne Michaelides; she later bore him 2 daughters, Elizabeth Mary Alethea in 1908 and Aelfrida Catharine Agatha in 1910. From 1907 until 1914 the Grahams lived in Russia, the United States of America, Germany and France as Constantine's Consular Service career dictated but during and after the Great War of 1914-1918 Tillyard and the children remained in Cambridge. During the war and thereafter Tillyard claimed to experience unwanted and sometimes unwelcome visits from dead persons known to or hitherto unknown by her; these included members of her family, former members of the Society for Psychical Research, Rupert Brooke and Roger Casement. Already under strain because of Constantine's infidelities and Tillyard's moral and religious obsessions, the Grahams' marriage broke down irretrievably following her brief but influential foray into esotericism under the guidance of occultist Aleister Crowley in 1913. Her compulsion to reveal marital discord and her own extramarital relationships in anthologies published in 1910, 1913 and 1916 also contributed to its failure. The Grahams divorced in 1921. Constantine's consular career kept him abroad thereafter until his death in Berlin in 1934; unlike her former husband, Tillyard never remarried but continued instead the series of intense friendships with younger men begun during her marriage, most notably with Ernest Altounyan, Hubert Henderson, Thomas Henn, John Layard, Juan Mascaro and Giovanni Papini. She also conducted one such friendship with a younger woman and one with older French author Albert Erlande.

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