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Marian Philpot Bradley (1831 – November 27, 1910), wife and mother, wrote of her deep bond with Emily Tennyson and in an 1865 diary entry observed more casually that her new governess was “a gentle, lively, wise, cultivated little creature... I love her and hope always to be very thoughtful for her and good to her.” In her journal Bradley wrote that she felt love of Christ most strongly when spending her “usual Sunday afternoons with her dearest” Emily Tennyson and when feeling inspired by her friend’s “devoted personal love to Xt.” Their religious bond strengthened their friendship, and Bradley wrote of telling Tennyson that she could talk to her “as I never can quite talk with anyone else— she said she felt it also— that we understand each other heart and soul.”
Marianne (Marian) Jane Philpot was born in Douglas, Isle of Man, on 1831 to Benjamin Philpot, rector of Great Cressingham, and late Archdeacon of Man, and Charlotte Vachell. She married George Granville Bradley (Very Reverend) at Great Cressingham on 18 December 1849. They had two sons and five daughters; of these children one son, Arthur Granville Bradley (1850–1943), and four daughters were writers, including Margaret Louisa Woods, Emily Tennyson Bradley (married Alexander Murray Smith), Mabel Charlotte, the Lady Birchenough (the wife of Sir Henry Birchenough, public servant and business man) and Rose Marian Bradley.[13]
From 1846 to 1858 George Granville Bradley was an assistant master at Rugby, at which time he succeeded GEL Cotton as Headmaster at Marlborough. In 1870 he was elected master of his old college at Oxford and August of 1881 he was made Dean of Westminster.
Marian Bradley wrote, “My diary is entirely a record of my inner life— the outer life is not varied. Quiet and pleasant but nothing worth recording occurs,” she in fact devoted hundreds of pages to recording an outer life that she accurately characterized as regular and predictable. Marian Bradley, an Anglican minister’s wife who began to keep a diary in 1854, frequently censured herself for procrastination, impatience, and extravagance, measuring her spiritual life by a rigid moral standard that militated against any hint of worldliness, spontaneity, or selfishness. Like the narrator of a didactic novel, Bradley assessed herself in relation to Christian values and filled her diary with ethical generalizations: “We live but to work, and work while we live, up to the very gates of the other world. How important a work is mine. To be a cheerful, loving Xtian wife, a forebearing and fond wise thoughtful mother— striving ever against self-indulgence and irritability.”
She passed away on 27 Nov 1910 in Hampton Court, Surrey, England.
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