Peruse her biography:

The Busy Autumn

Part I: The Tolkein Reconciliation
Part II: The Gorcharp Retribution

The Busy Autumn (1919)
Part I: The Tolkien Reconciliation

The world's post-war weariness in early 1919 rapidly degenerated into a prevailing state of surliness, liberally interspersed with episodes of raving lunacy. In retrospect, the 'Roaring Twenties' that were soon to arrive could not have been more aptly named.

The fall of 1919 was indeed a busy one for Emily, which included a brief stint as model for Karl Anderson, for his painting, "Youth in Autumn" (Emily on right). It is interesting to note that she is 63 -- clearly the freakish Flannigan genome was maintaining her youthful appearance.

The Winnipeg general strike was but one of myriad labour uprisings throughout North America and Europe, as workers the world over battled against bourgeois oppression. Awakened fully to their collective power toiling in the factories of the Great War, women were finally succeeding in their arduous fight for the right to vote. The ever-prescient Norwegians were folding their experiment with prohibition just as the Christian-right in the United States was conceiving its own misguided temperance movement. The Americans, when not frequenting speakeasies to illicitly quench their thirst, were packing movie houses to marvel at the burgeoning celluloid output of Hollywood. Meanwhile, the dour Germans watched hyper-inflation turn the price of bread into a commodity worthy of a mortgage, and the racists among them began listening to the anti-Semitic rantings of a stubby gent named Adolf Hitler. In Ireland, Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins championed the use of violence in their struggle for freedom from British tyranny, while Mahatma Gandhi was the man with a more peaceful plan in India. Across the pond, F. Scott Fitzgerald was fictionalizing about fornicating flappers and philosophers, while James Joyce was jabbering away in stream of consciousness about the mundane in Dublin. And in England, where Emily was in the fall of 1919, a young John Tolkien was titillating the literati of London with public readings that foreshadowed his future flair for the fantastical - harbingers of his humble Hobbit in a hole.

Remarkably ripe and still full of piss and vinegar, the globe-trotting Emily Chesley influenced the era in her own inimitable way. In October of 1919, at the tender age of 63, she fashioned the first of her extraordinary contributions to this historic period during her brief stay at the home of the noted philologist, his wife Mary Edith and their son John Francis. Tolkien was working at the time as an assistant lexicographer for the New English Dictionary but had begun airing his early fiction with intimate audiences at the Exeter College Essay Club. Quite by coincidence, Emily was invited to attend Tolkien's first public reading of The Fall of Gondolin by a mutual friend, Neville Coghill. When Chesley realized the identity of the young author, she seized the opportunity to bring closure to a long-festering family wound that had haunted her Uncle Michael to his early grave in 1901. (1)

After the reading, Emily proceeded to enchant "Tollers" with her aging but still compelling feminine charms. Tolkien, like many Britons, had become familiar with the Chesleyan oeuvre following her highly publicized sedition case before the Privy Council in 1908. He was most impressed by her speculative writing and it took little effort on Emily's part to cajole her way into a fortnight's boarding at the Tolkien residence.

Emily was not the only writer of Irish extraction to experience calumny and controversy. In 1918 the serialization of Ulysses in The Little Review, resulted in the British Foreign office opening a hostile file on him.

For the next two weeks, Emily and John were inseparable as Chesley shared her and her uncle's life stories and their tragic connection to Tolkien's father's death. Tolkien listened intently, drank incessantly, and wept intermittently during the telling of the long tales. "It was a cathartic, almost religious experience that purged from me unfathomably deep emotions which I had clearly suppressed since my childhood," he would later write. "The solace I found during our garden conversations, sobbing openly like a school boy, burrowing my teary brow into the milky crevasse of Emily's ample bosom, was as close to Nirvana as I will ever come. Nuzzling between those gleaming orbs offered the kind of holy sanctuary in which sinful men hope to remain forever by making earnest promises to God they know they cannot keep."

Before Emily departed for Plymouth in early November to aid Lady Nancy Astor in her bid to become the first woman elected to the British parliament, Tolkien had forgiven Michael Flannigan for his part in Arthur's untimely demise, and pledged to pursue his fantasies with a relentless fervor.

On to Part 2: The Gorcharp Retribution . . .>

Warning: Part 2 contains some material that may not be suitable for young
-- or exceedingly delicate --readers.

Notes:

1) Tolkien, the author, was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892. He recalled his memories of Africa as "slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider and a really nice Indian chap named Mahatma." At age 3, young Ronald (as he was known to family and early friends) boarded the SS Guelph for Birmingham, England, with his mother Mabel and younger brother Hilary. His father, a bank clerk named Arthur who was sympathetic to the plight of Asian immigrants mistreated by both the Brits and the Boers, remained in South Africa with plans to join his family later. However, Arthur died tragically in 1896 from a severe cranial hemorrhage after attempting to shave using an early prototype of the Single Action Facial Hair Removal Device while in arheumatic fever-induced delirium. Upon receiving news of the fatal accident, Mabel wrote to the not-yet-famous Mahatma Gandhi, a lawyer and close family friend living in Durban. In her letter, she pleaded with Gandhi to seek damages from the "nefarious inventor whose ridiculous contraption inflicted my beloved Arthur's mortal gash." Legal wranglings protracted for three years until the matter was finally settled out of court in 1899 when, on behalf of her uncle, Emily and Karl de Wittgen met personally with Gandhi during her South African sojourn (for more details of this meeting, see Foothills' Footnote. ). Though Emily inexplicably persuaded Gandhi to drop the legal action all together, much to the chagrin of the destitute Mabel, she could not remove the burden of guilt her uncle carried upon his shoulders. He never forgave himself that one of his inventions had left the two young Tolkien boys to grow up fatherless. It was a traumatic experience Flannigan had lived through all too painfully during his own bitter childhood. [back]