Rose Fyleman: a Nottingham Author 1877 – 1957
The Princess has arrived! On 11th May we celebrated the re-printing of Rose Fyleman’s fantasy A Princess Comes to Our Town, in a beautiful Bromley House Edition by Five Leaves Publishing. Rose was a Nottingham author born and bred and a member of the library for several years. And the town of the title is our town – Nottingham.
There stood the Princess in the Market-place. Illustration by Gertrude Lindsay.
Rose was the third of five children born to John Feilmann, a German Jewish immigrant, and his wife Emilee Loewenstein, who was of Russian descent. John was in the lace trade, a partner in Flersheim, Feilmann & Co. in the Lace Market. Rose was born in 1877, possibly at Waterloo Crescent but by 1888 the family were living at 7, Cavendish Crescent in The Park. They seem to have been pretty well off, though their fortunes undoubtedly went up and down with those of the lace trade.
Rose attended University College, but she didn’t finish her course; instead she began seriously to study music, training to be a singer in Paris, Berlin, and finally the Royal College of Music in London. She made her debut in a Promenade Concert at Queen’s Hall, London, in August 1903, billed as ‘Fraulien Rose Feilmann of Berlin’!
John Feilmann died around this time and the family move to 10, Pelham Crescent (now 29, Newcastle Drive), where Rose’s elder sister Gertrude ran a private school and where Rose taught music, whilst still appearing for several years on the concert platform. When the First World War began, many Germans who were British subjects felt insecure and changed their names, and so the Feilmanns became Fylemans.
Rose was forty when she began her writing career with her famous poem, “There are fairies at the bottom of our garden,” published anonymously in Punch in 1917. So what was it doing in a satirical magazine? Well, it has been observed* that fairies were rather popular amongst adults at the time, a spot of whimsy to alleviate the horrors of war, maybe, and Rose’s poems took off. Her first collection, Fairies and Chimneys, issued by Methuen, came out in 1918, to be followed by a whole stream of poetry in neat little matching books. But if you explore some of these you will see that some of her poems explore the darker side of folk lore – more Angela Carter than Fairyland.
A Princess Comes to Our Town is a delightful fantasy published in 1927. Princess Finestra leaves Fairyland to put off the evil day when she must marry a boring old prince, to live with Real People for awhile, and she lands in Nottingham where she is taken in by the Author on Standard Hill, which is only skip and a hop from 2, Castle Place where Rose was living at the time. She paints a lively and convincing picture of the town in the 1920s: the present Council House was being built, Queen Victoria still stood on her plinth at the bottom of Angel Row and the Goose Fair was held in the Market Place. Princess Finestra is a feisty young woman, with a handbag full of magic artefacts which can only be used once, then she must return home. She and the Author have a number of adventures – in the Arboretum, at the swimming baths and at the Castle where she magics an endless supply of ice-cream for all the kids in town. But for me, the funniest episode is the night they spend with Queen Victoria and a fire-engine.
In the late 1920s Rose moved to London where she wrote plays, educational material for children, more fiction and poems and we have many of these titles in the Library. I like to think that A Princess Comes to Our Town was Rose’s affectionate farewell to Nottingham. She died in 1957 and is buried in Golders Green Cemetery in London.
©Rowena Edlin-White
*David Lazell: Rose Fyleman, Nottingham’s Ambassador from Fairyland, 2001.
The Bromley House Editions of A Princess Comes to Our Town and The Rose Fyleman Fairy Book are available to buy from the library, and would make a perfect gift for anyone of any age, or for your own book shelf at home. To purchase a copy, contact the library direct on 01159 473134 or e-mail
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