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.
[2] 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.
On 19 January 1907 Tillyard reluctantly married Greco-American Constantine Cleanthes Graham (born Michaelides); they had two daughters, Elizabeth Mary Alethea in 1908 and Aelfrida Catharine Agatha in 1910.
Already under strain because of Constantine's infidelities and Tillyard's moral and religious obsessions, the Grahams' marriage broke down irretrievably following her brief but influential foray into esotericism under the guidance of occultist Aleister Crowley in 1913.
Unlike her former husband, Tillyard never remarried but continued a series of intense friendships with younger men begun during her marriage,[1] most notably with Ernest Altounyan, Hubert Henderson, Thomas Henn, John Layard, Juan Mascaro and Giovanni Papini.
Having already begun to record her mystico-spiritual experiences and their psychophysical manifestations in detailed diaries intended for posthumous publication, she also began to transcribe them in more or less fictionalised form in novels, homiletic books and moralistic short stories written between 1917 and 1958, some published, some not.
From 1946 to 1953 she lived a semi-reclusive and prayerful but troubled life in two clergy houses in Cambridgeshire, effected a degree of rapprochement with her surviving daughter, and enjoyed a close relationship with her elder brother.