Steadfast in the Midst of Chaos

The American author Nancy Brown was the keynote speaker at the 2018 Australian Chesterton Society conference at Campion College. In the first of her two presentations she spoke about her research which resulted in this excellent biography of Frances Chesterton, the gentle, creative and loving wife of English literary giant Gilbert Chesterton. Many Quadrant issues include a reference to G.K. Chesterton, so his work has continuing interest and value. His wife is almost a hidden figure, yet it is very likely that Gilbert would not have been free to think as deeply and to write as voluminously as he did without the careful ministrations and management of Frances. Anyone who esteems G.K. Chesterton owes much to his wife. Who was she? What was she like? How happy was their marriage? What happened to her after Gilbert died? Nancy Brown’s book, The Woman Who Was Chesterton, is the best attempt yet published to answer these questions. It is a book that has not attracted a fraction of the attention in Australia that it deserves.

The fact that Frances Chesterton has not garnered the interest accorded to her husband worked in Nancy Brown’s favour. There were resources, archives and family memorabilia untouched, unopened and unshared until the diligent Illinois researcher brought them to light. In her presentation at Campion College, Nancy Brown recounted her excitement at discovering and reading letters and notes that no previous biographer of either Gilbert or Frances had accessed. She made excellent use of this bounty, knowing it was especially valuable because Frances did not plan to leave favourable material after her for any future biographer.

Frances was not a vain woman. She was a practical, cheerful, thoughtful and faith-filled woman. She was also often ill, and grieved for years over her inability to have children. Nancy Brown, all the while honouring the dignity of Frances Chesterton, opens and chronicles the ebbs and flows of Frances’s personal, family and medical trials, and her many joys.

Her family, the Bloggs, lived in Bedford Park, a fashionable London suburb favoured by artistic types. Her father was a diamond trader. It was a lively household. The Yeats family, William and his sisters, lived nearby and visited, as did the painter Camille Pissarro. Frances received an excellent education, taught first by two German sisters who emphasised learning through play, outdoor activity, gardening and nature studies. Later, Frances attended St Stephen’s Anglo-Catholic college. There she was taught English, French, Greek, Latin, German, mathematics, and divinity. Crucially, her commitment to High Church Anglicanism was strengthened during these years. Frances, her brother, sisters and friends, formed a debating society, the IDK Society. When members were asked what IDK stood for, they could answer accurately yet mysteriously, “I don’t know.” 

Frances loved literature and wrote plays and poetry. However, the family was shadowed by death. Two of Frances’s sisters died in infancy. When Frances was fourteen, her father died. Frances’s elder sister died aged twenty-four in a cycling accident. These deaths badly affected Frances’s mother for a number of years. The family was plagued with depression. Frances’s brother, Knollys, after years of the illness, committed suicide when he was in his forties. Frances’s mood often darkened in cloudy and rainy weather. Moreover, she lived with frequent physical pain: she emerged from puberty with one leg shorter than the other, which resulted in lifelong hip and back pain. The pain sometimes wore her down and required periods of bed-rest to provide some relief. When she felt better she returned to her busy life. Gilbert was to say that Frances displayed “the asceticism of cheerfulness”.

In her twenties, Frances worked at the Parents’ National Education Union (PNEU), a body dedicated to supporting the teaching efforts of parents and governesses. She lived at home. Frances introduced herself to Gilbert when he was invited by a mutual friend who had fallen for Frances’s sister to attend a meeting of the IDK Society at the Bloggs’ house. Chesterton was an obscure book reviewer at the time, a tall, dishevelled but obviously brilliant and witty young man. He was attracted to Frances immediately; she was a beautiful young woman with crinkly brown hair, a clear complexion, a frank manner, and she was a Christian who lived her beliefs. Gilbert was moving from agnosticism towards theism and he found the integrity of her faith refreshing. He later wrote that a voice sounded in a flash in his mind when he first spoke with Frances. His intuition told him:

If I had anything to do with this girl I should go down on my knees to her; if I spoke with her she would never deceive me; if I depended on her she would never deny me; if I loved her she would never play with me; if I trusted her she would never go back on me; if I remembered her she would never forget me.

Chesterton’s intuitive flash was accurate. After some months courting, he proposed to Frances and was accepted. Their engagement lasted three years as Gilbert sought to establish a career as a writer to support a wife. The Blogg family had their misgivings: Gilbert was careless about his looks and his appointments (true) and hopeless with money (also true). But they underestimated Frances’s ability to manage these foibles.

Once they were married, Frances provided Gilbert with a hat to cover his unruly hair and a cape to cover his less than pristine clothes. The cape and hat became his signature look. Gilbert gratefully placed his appointments and his money in her hands. Frances resigned from the PNEU but remained involved with the union. Gilbert’s career, reputation and fame were burgeoning; helping him was a full-time job. Frances corrected his manuscripts, undertook the proofreading and negotiated the contracts with publishers. She hired the secretaries and the household help and maintained volumes of correspondence with friends, associates and family members. She nursed him when he was sick, injured or toothless—as he was for months while dentures were being prepared.

She often travelled with him to ensure he arrived at his destination. It was essential for her to travel with him on overseas speaking engagements because without her he got lost, forgot his notes, missed trains and didn’t look after himself. Further, she loved hearing him speak; he was a wonder to her, and she delighted to see that he was a wonder to other people too. Over the years, when their health permitted, they travelled to Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, Palestine, the United States, Canada, Poland, Malta and Belgium. Chesterton’s books, stories, poems and essays had an international reputation for insight, wit, common feeling and inventiveness.

Frances somehow found time for her own poetry and children’s plays. Her poems were set to music and anthologised, and her plays were performed in theatres and at Christmas pageants. She also wrote toy theatre plays and dramas for the Chesterton’s home theatrics—a small stage was built in a large room of their Beaconsfield home. They loved to entertain their neighbours and friends, and especially nieces, nephews, godchildren and neighbourhood children.

Frances and Gilbert couldn’t have children; three operations and a decade of trying to conceive proved fruitless. For years Frances could not look at a baby without tearful grief over her own childlessness. Eventually, she accepted her condition and found consolation in other people’s children, especially the children of her sister and the children of her and Gilbert’s many friends. The Chestertons were so welcoming and delighted children so much—there were puppets, miniature dolls, toy theatres, boxes of dress-ups, a large and beautiful garden designed by Frances, and many pets including a donkey named Trotsky—that some children stayed for weeks at a time and repeated the visits every year.

Life was incredibly busy for thirty-five years. Gilbert was a journalist, deeply involved in the running of various newspapers. The work caught him up in controversies and the exposure of corruption. It was draining and distracting work. Fortunately for us, Frances and a close friend of the Chestertons, Father O’Connor, noticed that the busyness distracted Gilbert from the more important work of writing books. Frances worked hard to protect his time so he could write what he wanted to write and he was indeed prolific, but it is also the case that there were more books planned that he never got around to writing. Throughout all this hectic activity, Frances continued to write her own poetry and plays, attending to their publication and performance. She also found time to nurse her ailing mother, Gilbert’s ageing parents and ill friends. Hilaire Belloc visited once, developed pneumonia, and remained with the Chestertons for a month; Frances nursed him back to health.

As Nancy Brown chronicles all this, she does not uncover any taint of morose martyrdom in Frances. Certainly, Frances was sadder on days of gloomy weather, and she worried that the depressive trait in her family might overwhelm her. Frequent sickness and chronic pain were a burden; worries about money were common because some of the newspapers Gilbert supported had failed. She worried about Gilbert’s health too, which was frail despite his great frame. She battled to help him meet his newspaper deadlines, and sometimes he had episodes of weariness and depression. He loved beer, sausages and cigars, none of which were good for his health. Frances tried to direct him towards better habits.

When Gilbert became Catholic, Frances was troubled for a time because she was very happy in the High Anglican church. After some years of questioning and soul-searching, Frances moved too into Catholicism and that disjunction between them was healed. Both Gilbert and Frances experienced periods of loneliness when they were separated by hospitalisation or speaking commitments. They liked being together. They were gentle with each other. They admired each other. They were best friends as well as lovers. Gore Vidal once wrote that love is a fan club with only two members. Gilbert and Frances were dedicated fans of one another.

There was great pain for Frances when this closeness ended with Gilbert’s death after yet another illness. He had been unwell for months, often tired and losing concentration while writing, but he’d recovered from so many sicknesses that it was still a shock when he died. He was sixty-two years old. Frances never recovered from the loss. The chapters dealing with her widowhood are heart-rending. Frances is portrayed in her bereavement as finding consolation in her Christianity; but it didn’t bring Gilbert back to her, and her religion could not hold her hand, stroke her hair, or laugh with her. She battled on, but was horribly wounded, lost and lonely even as friends and family tended to her. She couldn’t bear that Gilbert didn’t need her any more; her key role in life had disappeared with him. She had his legacy to care for, and some shared projects to complete, but widowhood was distressing. She died, from cancer, two years after Gilbert.

One of the strengths of Nancy Brown’s work is her loving objectivity. She admits that she grew to love Frances Chesterton as she learned more about her, but this doesn’t stop her telling the truth about Frances or Gilbert, or their family members. Gilbert himself observed that love is not blind—it is full of insight. Thus, a faithful priest can criticise the Church with a more trenchant accuracy than any sceptic; a biographer who loves her subject, without sentimentality, is capable of seeing more of the truth, not less—and of being fairer with the truth.

The Woman Who Was Frances is not a piece of soppy hagiography. It is filled with the realities of life: the bouts of depression, and an abscess big enough to corrupt three of Frances’s teeth are among the many details. What emerges with clarity is the love the Chestertons had for each other and for many other people, their constant battle with sickness, the frustrations of fame, the struggle with childlessness, Frances’s unexpected literary creativity, the deeply orthodox spirituality and the sharp pain of loss.

Nancy Brown describes herself as a wife, mother and home-schooler, all noble roles, but not a scholar. Still her book has a wealth of scholarly-type accoutrements which add to its value, including a list of sources, an index, a timeline, a list of the known published works and music of Frances Chesterton, some of the obituaries of Frances, full texts of the wills of both Gilbert and Frances, and the text of the funeral card of Frances Chesterton. Also, there are eight pages of well-chosen photographs. I’ve read the book twice: easy to do because Nancy Brown tells the story in a brisk and accessible style. No doubt, I’ll read it again; it is that good. Brown writes that Frances Chesterton is “an example of steadfastness in the midst of chaos, hope in the midst of fears, a life of unselfish service, humility and joy in the midst of sickness and death”.

Frances Chesterton’s poetry has been overlooked. This poem was written during her widowhood after a visit to Rome, a place she and Gilbert loved. 

Sun and Shade

I who walked with you in the sun

But now walk in the shade

How can I feel the warmth and light?

I am afraid.

Afraid to enter in these holy doors

Where once you prayed with me

How can I glory in the Mass

In poverty?

Poor I am, lacking your tender love

Not even the widow’s mite

To cast into the treasury heap

With such delight

That I could add to your vast store

Of generosity

That gave your mirth, your love, yourself

In boundless charity.

The Woman Who Was Chesterton
by Nancy Carpentier Brown
American Chesterton Society/Saint Benedict Press, 2015, 266 pages, US$16.95

Gary Furnell, who lives in rural New South Wales, is a frequent contributor of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent story, “Conversation in the Hearse”, appeared in the April issue.