While in St Andrews Jane became close friends with James and Ellen Brookes-Smith (*Brookes-Smith family), whose daughters attended a school in the city. Ellen was a kindred spirit, and in July 1911 the two became joint owners of two farms and adjacent land in Gedling, Church Farm (renamed Phoenix Farm) and Manor Farm, following their auction that March when Jane had independently bid for Church Farm. The 1911 Census, conducted on 2 April, records Jane as a boarder at Church Farm, presumably to look at the property with its tenant farmer, Arthur Lamb.
In late summer 1911 Jane and her nephews, Ronald and *Hilary Tolkien, joined a walking tour in *Switzerland organized by the Brookes-Smiths. In 1912 she resigned her position at St Andrews and moved to Gedling; she is listed in a local directory for 1912 as a farmer. With Ellen Brookes-Smith she managed and worked Phoenix Farm and Manor Farm. Hilary Tolkien joined them there, having chosen a life in agriculture. Ronald visited his aunt and brother and the Brookes-Smiths at Gedling on several occasions, and made at least three drawings of Phoenix Farm.
The NeaveBrookes-Smith partnership was dissolved in 1922, a result, perhaps, of the deep depression into which English agriculture fell immediately after the end of the First World War. Jane then appears to have lived briefly in Devon before buying another farm, at Dormston, Inkberrow, Worcestershire. Known as Dormston Manor Farm as well as a variety of other names, most notably Bag End, it comprised just over 200 acres and included among several buildings an early manor house which had been substantially rebuilt in 1582. This was a substantial dwelling, brick at the front and half-timbered at the back, and with three wings. From 1923 until 1927 Jane worked the farm in partnership with Marjorie Atlee, a former pupil who had worked at Gedling as a land girl and in 1927 married Janes nephew Frank Suffield (son of Mark Oliver Suffield). Janes father, John Suffield, spent much time at Bag End in his final years.
In 1931 Jane sold the Bag End farm except for two cottages. She let one of these and lived for a short while in the other (Church Cottage) before moving to Chelmsford in Essex. According to Andrew Morton (see references below), Jane now pursued an interest in medieval mysticism and moved to Chelmsford to be near the Diocesan retreat run by the mystic Evelyn Underhill. In 1937, however, she returned to Church Cottage, where she stayed for ten years. Later she lived in a caravan on Hilary Tolkiens farm in Blackminster, and finally in Gilfachreda in West Wales with Frank and Marjorie Suffield.
Tolkien wrote of his Aunt Jane to Joyce Reeves on 4 November 1961: The professional aunt is a fairly recent development, perhaps; but I was fortunate in having an early example: one of the first women to take a science degree. She is now ninety, but only a few years ago went botanizing in Switzerland (Letters, p. 308). Asked by Jane earlier that year if you wouldnt get out a small book with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it, the sort of book that we old uns can afford to buy for Christmas presents, Tolkien assembled *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962). It was published just in time to delight his aunt a few months before her death.
See further, including photographs of Jane Neave, Morton and Hayes, Tolkiens Gedling, 1914; Andrew H. Morton, Tolkiens Bag End (2009); and Maggie Burns, Jane Suffield, Connecting Histories website.
Nesbit, Edith (18581924). Despite the death of her father when she was three, the English writer E. Nesbit enjoyed a generally happy childhood with her mother and siblings: she was the youngest of five surviving children. Her marriage in 1880 to Hubert Bland was unconventional: both had lovers, and Blands two illegitimate children were brought up together with the three surviving children of the marriage. Hubert and Edith were also founding members of the Fabian Society, formed to propagate evolutionary socialism. After Huberts death Nesbit married an old friend, Tommy Tucker, with whom she lived the rest of her life. Among Nesbits likely lovers, certainly a close admirer, was *R.W. Reynolds, one of Tolkiens masters at *King Edwards School, Birmingham. Nesbit dedicated her adult novel The Incomplete Amorist (1906) partly to Reynolds and used his Christian name for one of the Bastables in her childrens fiction.
To supplement family income Nesbit sold poems and juvenile and adult fiction to magazines, much of it hack-work. It was not until she was almost forty that she wrote the first of the childrens stories that brought her fame. Her stories of the Bastable family began to appear in 1897, and were published in book form as The Story of the Treasure Seekers in 1899. Tales of children trying to find ways to make money to amend the fortunes of their impoverished family, they were appreciated by readers of all ages. Further books about the Bastables followed, including The Wouldbegoods (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). *Roger Lancelyn Green notes in Tellers of Tales: Childrens Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (rewritten and rev. edn. 1965) that it was from her own holiday life that Edith derived the joyous recollections of childhood evident in her work (p. 208). She had, as perhaps no other author has quite possessed it, the power of becoming a child again, of thinking and inventing with her child characters, speaking and writing from their point of view but with the skill and discrimination of a practised author (p. 206). The Railway Children, probably her best known story about ordinary children and their leisure activities, was first published (in book form) in 1906.
To supplement family income Nesbit sold poems and juvenile and adult fiction to magazines, much of it hack-work. It was not until she was almost forty that she wrote the first of the childrens stories that brought her fame. Her stories of the Bastable family began to appear in 1897, and were published in book form as The Story of the Treasure Seekers in 1899. Tales of children trying to find ways to make money to amend the fortunes of their impoverished family, they were appreciated by readers of all ages. Further books about the Bastables followed, including The Wouldbegoods (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). *Roger Lancelyn Green notes in Tellers of Tales: Childrens Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (rewritten and rev. edn. 1965) that it was from her own holiday life that Edith derived the joyous recollections of childhood evident in her work (p. 208). She had, as perhaps no other author has quite possessed it, the power of becoming a child again, of thinking and inventing with her child characters, speaking and writing from their point of view but with the skill and discrimination of a practised author (p. 206). The Railway Children, probably her best known story about ordinary children and their leisure activities, was first published (in book form) in 1906.
In 1900 eight short stories by Nesbit which had appeared in Strand Magazine the previous year were collected in The Book of Dragons. In writing of many of these dragons, comic figures that are no match for their child opponents, Nesbit may have been influenced by The Reluctant Dragon by *Kenneth Grahame (1898), and Grahames story and Nesbits collection may have contributed in turn to the character of Chrysophylax in *Farmer Giles of Ham (1949).
Nesbit also wrote two stories about children travelling into their familys past, The House of Arden (1908) and Hardings Luck (1909). Virginia Luling has suggested (Going Back: Time Travel in Tolkien and E. Nesbit, Mallorn 53 (Spring 2012)) that the first of these, in which the protagonists, Edred and Elfrida, find themselves living in the bodies of their ancestors, may have influenced Tolkien in writing *The Lost Road and *The Notion Club Papers.
But better known among Nesbits works are those in which contemporary children experience magical adventures, especially Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Roger Lancelyn Greens comment on the opening of the first of Nesbits dragon stories is also applicable to these: And so straight into the realm of magic, with the prosaicness of everyday life that makes it absolutely real and acceptable; the mixture of fancy and observation which is the real child-world, the game come to life and the day-dream that stands up to the clear light of noon (Teller of Tales, p. 211).
On 31 August 1938 Tolkien wrote to C.A. Furth at George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) that Nesbit was an author I delight in (courtesy of Christopher Tolkien), and in drafts for *On Fairy-Stories he wrote of the triumphant formula that E. Nesbit found in the Amulet and the Phoenix and the Carpet (*On Fairy-Stories (extended edn. 2008), p. 251). From The Story of the Amulet and the earlier Five Children and It Tolkien borrowed the Psammead for his own *Roverandom (1998). In Five Children and It, while digging a hole in a gravel-pit children find in sand at the bottom a strange creature: Its eyes were on long horns like a snails eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bats ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spiders and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkeys (1912 printing, p. 14). It is a Psammead, or sand-fairy. It likes to sleep in warm sand, dislikes getting wet, and if disturbed can be rather gruff. Like Gandalf at the beginning of *The Hobbit it plays with the meaning of words and conventional phrases: when one of the children says that now one comes to look at you she can see that it is a sand-fairy, the Psammead replies, with literal correctness, You came to look at me several sentences ago (p. 16). The Psammead magically grants the children a series of wishes, almost all of which have unfortunate consequences, but luckily the magic lasts only until sunset. Similarly in Roverandom the dog Rover, who has been turned into a toy, meets a sand-sorcerer called Psamathos Psamathides, an excellent magician who liked to lie buried in warm sand when the sun was shining, so that not more than the tip of one of his long ears stuck out (p. 11; long ears was an emendation from long horns), certainly was ugly (p. 13), and had a fat tummy (p. 16) and legs like a rabbit (p. 57). Psamathos saves Rover from the incoming tide, and sends him on excursions to the Moon and to the mer-kings palace under the sea. In the earliest text of Roverandom the sand-sorcerer is actually called a psammead.
Another work by Nesbit with elements analogous to some in Tolkiens fiction is The Enchanted Castle, first published in 1907. Among the treasures of an estate (the castle of the title) in Englands West Country is a magic ring whose power changes according to whatever its possessor declares sometimes unwittingly, and as always in a Nesbit story, with unfortunate consequences. Most notably, the ring can confer invisibility, but has no effect on the wearers shadow: In the blazing sunlight that flooded the High Street four shadows to three children seemed dangerously noticeable. A butchers boy looked far too earnestly at the extra shadow, and his big liver-coloured lurcher snuffed at the legs of that shadows mistress and whined uncomfortably (ch. 3). The presence of a shadow cast by an otherwise unseen person recalls The Hobbit, Chapter 5, in which goblins see the invisible Bilbos shadow as he escapes through the back-gate, while the ability of a dog to detect someone who cannot be seen brings to mind early texts of The Lord of the Rings in which Bingo puts on the Ring, becoming invisible, in the house of Farmer Maggot, but the farmers dog remained behind jumping and frisking round Bingo to his annoyance (The Return of the Shadow, p. 94) or halted near Bingo sniffing and growling with the hair rising on its neck, and a puzzled look in its eyes (The Return of the Shadow, p. 290). In another scene, when the invisible Mabel is having tea, it was rather horrid to see the bread and butter waving about in the air, and bite after bite disappearing from it apparently by no human agency; and the spoon rising with apple in it and returning to the plate empty, or a mug of milk was suspended in the air without visible means of support (ch. 3). Compare again, perhaps, invisible Bingos (later Frodos) visit to Farmer Maggot during which a mug left the table, rose, tilted in the air, and then returned empty to its place (The Return of the Shadow, pp. 96, 292).