Alice Elgar

Caroline Alice, Lady Elgar (9 October 1848 – 7 April 1920) was an English author of verse and prose fiction, who married the composer Edward Elgar.

Caroline Alice Roberts, known as Alice, was born in Bhuj, Gujarat, India, in 1848. She was the youngest child and only daughter of Major-General Sir Henry Gee Roberts KCB (1800–1860), and Julia Maria Raikes (1815–1887). Her three elder brothers were Albert Henry Roberts (born in 1839 and died young), Frederick Boyd Roberts (born 1841) and Stanley Napier Roberts (born 1844). Their father was serving in India at the time of the Indian Mutiny, and he died when Alice was aged only 12.

She was from a distinguished family: on her mother's side her grandfather was the Rev. Robert Napier Raikes, her great-grandfather Robert Raikes (1736–1811) was the founder of the Sunday school movement, and her uncle was British Indian Army General Robert Napier Raikes (1813–1909).

As a girl she studied with the amateur geologist Rev W. S. Symonds and they and a group of her friends went fossil-hunting on the banks of the river Severn. She wrote the index to a book by him. She studied the piano with Ferdinand Kufferath in Brussels and harmony with Charles Harford Lloyd. She spoke fluent German, and also Italian, French and Spanish.

Before she was married her writing was published under the name C. Alice Roberts. A two-volume novel, Marchcroft Manor, was published in 1882, four years before she met Elgar. The Elgar scholar Diana McVeagh describes it as "quite an accomplished, entertaining, indeed touching tale, with a control of pace and situation, and a humour that might well surprise anyone knowing Alice only from her later verses, letters and diary". McVeagh also notes that earlier critics have drawn attention to the "tincture of radicalism" in the book.

In 1886 Alice Roberts' brothers had left to join the army and she was living with her elderly widowed mother at Hazeldine House at Redmarley in Worcestershire (now in Gloucestershire). That autumn she took up piano accompaniment lessons from Edward Elgar, who was violin teacher at Worcester High School. When her mother died the next year she went abroad for a while before returning to settle down at a house in Malvern Link called Ripple Lodge, and continued with her accompaniment lessons. She became engaged to her young teacher, much to the disapproval of her strongly Anglican family, who not only considered her fiancé a poor tradesman of a lower social class, but noted that he was eight years her junior and a devout Roman Catholic.

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