Richard Grenfell Aylmer wrote a series of geography school textbooks in the 1970s.
Two contemporary woman writers
Janet and Ursula Aylmer both have books in print, with very particular specialities: Jane Austen and Oxford, respectively.
Janet's two books are Darcy's Story
(1996; retells Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice from the standpoint of its male protagonist)
and In the Footsteps of Jane Austen (2003). The former in particular has been well received.
Both are sold by the tiny press of
Copperfield Books in Bath.
Ursula has been associated with four books: Town Grows Up (1971; for children), Views of Oxford (1989),
Oxford Food: an Anthology (1995; editor) and Most Noble Bodley! (2005; on the university library).
The Aylmer name in poetry
Not Aylmer poets so much as Aylmer subjects in poetry.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (top picture in sidebar), one of the most significant of Victorian poets,
indeed poet laureate for many years, besmirched the Aylmer name.
Tennyson's poem Aylmer's Field does not show the family name in good light.
Published at the height of his fame, it is, with the title piece, one of the two longest poems in the 1864 collection Enoch Arden.
In the poem, Sir Aylmer Aylmer is lord of a Suffolk manor, the latest in a long aristocratic line.
He expects his only child Edith to make an appropriate match, but she is in love with the rector's brother Leolin.
Separated, she dies of a broken heart, and sensing this from afar Leolin kills himself with a dagger Edith had given him.
The rector's sermon at her funeral is full of contempt for Aylmer Aylmer's world, which falls apart in the poem's stark ending -
Aylmer's hall becomes an open field where
"The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there / Follows the mouse ..."
Aylmer's Field is not commonly thought to be the best of Tennyson.
There is a commentary
by Marion Shaw of Loughborough University published by the Literary Dictionary Company;
the text of the poem is available, among other places, at
everypoet.com
Tennyson was Lincolnshire born, and his statue stands in the grounds of Lincoln cathedral,
where Bishop John Aylmer was once archdeacon.
A generation before, an elegant little eight-line miniature was more praising.
Ah, what avails the sceptred race!
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.
These lines, which date from 1846, are by Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) (picture 2);
they refer to the short-lived (1779-1800) daughter of the fourth Baron Aylmer, Sir Henry.
