E.M. Almedingen

Martha Edith von Almedingen, known to her friends as Chris, was a British novelist, biographer and children’s author. She was able to read eight different languages: French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, Old Bulgarian, Old Norse and English.

Photograph of E.M. Almedingen, signed “With much love, Chris”[MS15/A4396/9/2]

She was born Marta Aleksandrovna Almedigen in St. Petersburg in 1898, the youngest daughter to a British-Russian woman Olga Sergeevna and her husband Alexander Almedingen. Alexander was a Professor of Chemistry. He abandoned his family in 1900 and they lived in increasingly impoverished circumstances.

Almedingen attended the Kseniinsky (Xenia) Institute for Noble Maidens from the age of 15, an exclusive boarding school in St. Petersburg. She earned the highest honours in Literature and History in 1913. From 1916-20 she read Medieval History at Petrograd University; this was where she earned her first doctorate. She taught English, medieval history and literature, 1921-22, and was made a Member of the Faculty. She left Russia in 1922 and spent some time in Rome.

Advertisement for Almedingen’s childrens’ books, published by Oxford University [MS15/A4012/1/3]

In 1923, E.M. Almedingen emigrated to the UK; she nationalised as a British subject less than ten years later. Initially she worked as a journalist and author. During the war she worked at her local Citizens’ Advice Bureau and also as a tutor. From the 1950s, she was a lecturer in Russian history and literature at Oxford University.

Miss Almedigen lived in London for some years before moving to the country in the early thirties. She later moved to a seventeenth-century cottage in a Somerset valley.

Almedingen’s rural cottage [MS15/A4396/9/1]

Despite her wide range of work from biography to poetry, she became well-known for her children’s novels in particular. 

She died on 5 March 1971 and is buried in Ashwick churchyard in Oakhill, Somerset.

Our collection (MS15) includes notebooks with manuscripts drafts of her work as well as typescript drafts and some correspondence. There are also parts by and about her friends Frances M. Pilkington and Kathleen E. Dickins.