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Mary Fairburn, born London 13 June 1933, is an English artist and musician, living since 1976 in Victoria, Australia, and best known for her illustrations for The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Early Life
Mary Fairburn was brought up in Winchester, and educated in Winchester and London at the Winchester School of Art (now part of the University of Southampton); London University, where she did she did an Art Teaching Diploma, and while living in Malet St near the Slade, she took some classes there in sculpture under F. E. McWilliam. Her first position was as an art teacher at a Franciscan boys’ school, St. Bonaventure’s, Forest Gate, east of London. In the evenings she went to classes in lithography and pottery at the LCC Central School of Art and Design. In 1958, she took a job in southwest Iran, at Masjid-i-Sulaiman, teaching art and music to the children of employees of the Iranian Oil Exploration and Producing Company, which like all Iranian oil companies had recently been taken over by Americans. In 1959-60 she spent a number of months each year in Jerusalem, where she did a lot of painting.

Mary Fairburn was always attracted to the intersection of the artistic and the spiritual life – she had converted to Catholicism at age 18 – and after she left Iran in 1960, she spent a few months as a novice of a lay Catholic order in Belgium, Les Auxiliaires Féminines Internationales. When she was told that she didn’t have a vocation, she returned to London, and almost immediately was drawn into an unofficial Catholic “order,” St. Gemma’s House, which was run and privately funded by the eccentric and charismatic Joan Cuddon-Fletcher, informally supported by Westminster Cathedral, and ministered to the down-and-out. With one of the brothers, Mary built and fitted out a chapel in one of the order’s houses, in Duck Lane, off Berwick St. in Soho. She was frequently in trouble for talking, playing the organ, and other insubordination, and was eventually dismissed and hitch-hiked back to Winchester. Taken by in there by the Catholic priest, Canon Sidney Mullarky (1909-1992), she was commissioned by John King (bishop of Portsmouth) to paint a large mural of the life of St. Peter for the modernisation of St. Peter’s Catholic Primary School, Gordon Road (this was destroyed when the old school was demolished in 1985).

In 1961, at the age of 28, she took a job teaching English at a Berlitz Language School in Catanzaro in Calabria, southern Italy. She did not enjoy the work, and one night in a bar she met the local barone, a retired opera singer named Francisco Opipari. He engaged her to teach him painting, and to paint a large fresco illustrating the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in his mansion. While living there, she entered and won an art competition in nearby Amantea on the Tyrrhenian coast and, finding herself in an embarrassing situation with her bachelor patron, she used the prize money to leave Italy, and trek via Sicily across Africa. On the border of Kenya and Uganda, she met a Frenchman, Louis Lemaitre, who became her first husband, when they were both given a lift in the same car. They passed through thirteen countries, and she picked up work translating for embassies. By 1963 they were back in Italy, where she was still under contract to finish her mural.

Mary and Louis returned to Winchester, and lived in the village of Chilcombe, where she prepared her African paintings for an exhibition in 1966. She taught art for a period at a girls’ secondary school in Andover, Hampshire, but she and her husband were unable to get a loan to buy a house in England. In 1967 she bought a Mini Moke (on export license to Singapore), in an attempt to get to Australia. They had planned to make the trip across the Middle East and south Asia in summer, but due to problems with paperwork, they could get no further than Lahore, where they remained for three months before heading back in the middle of winter towards England. They stayed for a couple of months in Tehran, with Robin Allan (1934-2014), a friend of Mary’s from Winchester Art School days, who had read English at Cambridge, and was working for the British Council.

Robin Allan, who was later to become a theatre and TV producer and lecturer in drama, was an enthusiastic devotee of The Lord of the Rings – at the time still a cult book and only available in three hardback volumes. Mary read his copies while staying in his house, and immediately became creatively possessed by the work, and began working on a suite of illustrations. When she got back to England, she brought a number of the sketches to a more finished state, and in May 1968 sent them with an enthusiastic letter to J.R.R. Tolkien.

Correspondence with Tolkien
There are seven known surviving letters of the correspondence between Mary Fairburn and Tolkien. He replied to her first letter and package on 24 May 1968, and told her, “I think the samples of illustrations you sent me are splendid. They are better pictures in themselves and also show far more attention to the text than any that have yet been submitted to me. […] After seeing your specimens I am beginning to […] think that an illustrated edition might be a good thing.” With this encouragement, Mary Fairburn sent three more paintings to Tolkien, including the Mirror of Galadriel and the Inn at Bree.

However, Tolkien’s affairs were thrown into chaos by the unfortunate accident of him breaking his leg, which required him to be hospitalized from 17 June to 16 July, and in a foot-to-waist plaster until 8 September, when he returned to hospital for orthopaedic treatment until 20 September. At the same time, Tolkien and his wife had arranged to move house, from Oxford to Poole, near Bournemouth, and his books and papers were for months disorganised and inaccessible. Having not heard anything from Tolkien for two months, Mary sent an anxious letter, perhaps with more pictures, as in his reply of 4 September he reported having found “your three envelopes with pictures.” He apologised for her “anxiety, caused by my unfortunate accident”, but also said that “the prospect of an illustrated edition is not promising” – and added “I like the pictures – certainly some of them – enough to make you a private offer of purchase.”

Mary replied saying that she was in straightened circumstances, “sleeping on the floor of a condemned basement”, and asked for all her pictures to be returned, as she had promised the originals to a friend (Robin Allan) in repayment of a “large debt.” Tolkien promptly returned all the pictures he had, by registered mail, but expressed interest in seeing other pictures she had mentioned, as well as saying that he had been talking by telephone to his publisher, Rayner Unwin, and reported “He was not so decisive as I had expected, & was evidently ready to ‘consider’ an illustrated edition,” and in closing noted that he was sending her a gift of £50. Mary in her reply offered to give all the pictures to Tolkien and to use his gift in partial repayment of her debt. In his letter of 4 November, the final surviving letter of this correspondence, Tolkien says that he did have the wall-space for all the pictures, but would like to have Galadriel, which he said “so very nearly corresponds to my own mental image of the scene.” This painting is still in the possession of the Tolkien family.

Later Career
Regular work was hard to find, and housing in the south of England was scarce, due to the huge increase in immigration, and Mary Fairburn and her husband continued to live somewhat precariously, making their home in all sorts of places, in England, France and Spain, with friends and in hippy pads, and occasionally living rough. During this period many of her books and papers were dispersed, and not recovered. She continued to engage in artistic projects, in particular in 1969 constructing and painting a dramatic set of Stations of the Cross and a ceiling mural in the newly-built St. Stephen’s Catholic church in Winchester. She and Louis moved to southeastern France and lived in a cave <>, and subsequently separated. Mary worked for a period in Calcutta with the Missionaries of Charity, and eventually moved in 1976 to Melbourne, Australia, where she later remarried.

She and her husband, Patrick Currie Flegg (1927-1999), were involved in a number of musical ensembles in Melbourne and the Victorian provincial city of Castlemaine, to which they retired in 1993. Patrick Flegg died in 1999, and in 2001 Mary produced a CD of his musical compositions, of which the title track, a piano suite, “Anduin, The Mighty River”, was inspired by Tolkien. In 2010 Mary’s Tolkien work came to the attention of literary scholar Paul Tankard who, having interviewed Mary and read her letters from Tolkien, obtained images of all the nine surviving pictures, accessed Mary’s side of the correspondence by courtesy of the Tolkien Estate, and reported the episode in an essay in the Times Literary Supplement. This led to Mary Fairburn’s pictures, with three newly painted images, being featured in the Official Tolkien Calendar 2015, published by HarperCollins.

Mary Fairburn remains active in her local community as an artist, folk musician, a tricyclist, a taker-in of the homeless, and an agitator on the behalf of local conservation causes. She has also written and illustrated three fantasy novels of her own as well as a long and vivid autobiography (all unpublished).

Exhibitions
Her work has been exhibited in Winchester (1955, 1968), Amatea, Italy (1963), Southampton (1965), Melbourne (1989) and Castlemaine (1996, 2013).