Aelfrida Tillyard

Aelfrida Catharine 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. One of her dystopian novels is seen as a forerunner of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Early life 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. Her mother was one of the first women to take the Higher Local Examination after attending lectures for women in Cambridge. Tillyard had three 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 literary 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. Unable to tolerate formal schooling, she was educated privately by Cambridge lecturers 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 languages at Cambridge schools, but she wanted to write.

Following Alfred and Catharine Tillyard's respective deaths in 1929 and 1932, she decided to absolve herself of responsibility for her home and daughters in order to pursue her private and personal 'mystic way'. She was nevertheless dismayed when her daughters abandoned her, Alethea by becoming a nun and missionary, Agatha by suicide. In pursuit of her 'closer walk with God' Tillyard also became an Anglo-Catholic and (briefly) an extern oblate of St Mary's Abbey, West Malling, Kent.

Tillyard wrote two science fiction novels articulating her conservative political views. Concrete: A Story of Two Hundred Years Hence (1930) is set in an anti-religious dystopia controlled by the eugenics movement. The novel includes a character called "Big Brother" who leads a "Ministry of Reason" and there is also a propaganda department called the "Ministry of Aesthetics". The story has been compared to George Orwell's later Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Approaching Storm (1932) is another dystopia set in a Britain ruled by a left-wing dictatorship.

In 1934 she moved to Oxford Spiritual Exercises (SPCK London) 1927 The Young Milliner (Hutchinson & Co London) 1929 The Way We Grow Up (Hutchinson & Co London) 1929 Can I Be a Mystic? (Rider & Co London) 1930 Concrete (Hutchinson & Co London) 1930 Haste to the Wedding (Hutchinson & Co London) 1931 The Approaching Storm (Hutchinson & Co London) 1932 The Closer Walk with God (SPCK London) 1935 The Way of Praise (SPCK London) 1937 The Night Watches (Faith Press London) 1938 Memory Pictures (The Watchword) 1953-1958 The Fruits of Silence (British Publishing Co Gloucester) 1949 The Silence of God (British Publishing Co Gloucester) 1950