Frances Chesterton wrote “How Far is it to Bethlehem?” in 1917, near the end of World War I and sixteen years into her marriage to the famous writer Gilbert Chesterton. The couple printed it on their Christmas card. It has been widely reprinted and recited since. In the first written biography of Frances, The Woman Who Was Chesterton, Nancy Carpentier Brown frames the poet’s life by her own question:


How far is it to Bethlehem?

Not very far.

Shall we find the stable room,

Lit by a star?

Can we see the little Child?

Is He within?

If we lift the wooden latch

May we go in?


The verse then asks if we may stroke the animals, and the “tiny hand” of Jesus, and contrasts our gift of “little smiles and little tears” to the grand gifts of kings; and finally claims that we, too, may sleep with the infant Christ, “as they sleep who find / Their heart’s desire.”

Many questions and a single answer: Yes, we will rest with Christ. Yes, we can have our heart’s desire.

Frances Before Gilbert

Frances Chesterton was born Frances Alice Blogg, on June 28, 1869, the oldest of seven children. Her father was a diamond merchant, who died when she was fourteen. Her mother was a housewife and writer prone to serious depression. Brown calls Frances a “beauty,” but one who was also afflicted with chronic ailments. One of her legs grew longer than the other, which forced her to walk with a cane and caused her considerable hip and back pain.

The Bloggs were not religious. Studying at an Anglican college that included a convent, Frances encountered Anglo-Catholicism (the more Catholic style of Anglicanism) and became a devout church-goer and Sunday school teacher. After school, she moved back in with her family and worked as a writer and general secretary for the Parents’ National Educational Union.

Her family then lived in Bedford Park, a London neighborhood boasting residents like Yeats, E. Nesbit, and Pissarro. Frances’s sister Gertrude was secretary to Rudyard Kipling and the governess of his children. Blogg relatives included a German fairytale scholar, poets, and editors of various stripes. Common religions in this fashionable society included spiritualism and the occult.

Frances endured the premature deaths of her father and two sisters, a brother’s suicide, her own infertility, chronic illness and pain, and the scourge of the press. Brown argues that Frances’s perseverance and servitude through the trials of her earthly pilgrimage make her a remarkable character, and even heroically virtuous. Commenting on heroic virtue is beyond my scope; however, I find Frances worthy of emulation.

As a researcher, Brown had her work cut out for her. While Gilbert (as Frances called him)  produced more written evidence of himself than most people could read in a lifetime, she deliberately left few breadcrumbs behind. She asked her husband to keep her out of his autobiography and had many of their letters to each other burned. She wrote in her diary of the horrors of the American press, and when she converted to Catholicism, she asked for parish staff to remove the poster of her they had proudly placed in the hall. The thing mortified her.

The Trail of Crumbs

Yet Frances was a published writer and sometimes speaker herself. She was a clever, devout woman. In addition to writing poetry, she wrote plays and essays on education, organized children’s theatre, served the poor, kept correspondence and a schedule for her husband, as well as kept him writing and alive. Brown insists that Frances kept hidden not out of timidity, but humility.  

Evidence of Frances’s thought lies in her published writing. Evidence of her life remains in the correspondence she kept for her own interest, and on behalf of Gilbert. In particular, letters between Frances and Fr. John O’Connor, also a friend of her husband’s and model for Fr. Brown, elucidate her spiritual and marital trials. Gilbert left behind only good romantic salutations. We find, from Frances, that their romance was not devoid of trials, but rather forged through them.

The Woman Who Was Chesterton is both meticulously researched and moving. With some partiality, Brown accounts for Frances’s beginnings. A dearth of resources from Frances’s early life may be why, as the book begins, a few passages patch events and analysis together incongruously. Here, Brown’s occasional “quites” and “verys” in describing Frances’s character only obscure an already incomplete portrait. The generalization and subjectivity made me cringe in an otherwise informative, objective history.

When Gilbert Chesterton enters the book as Frances’s suitor, he is immediately the most interesting character, winning a debate with his usual flourish as a newcomer to the Bloggs’ “I.D.K. (I Don’t Know) Debating Society.” By the book’s end, I found myself loving Frances every bit as much as Gilbert, tearing up at the letters of bereavement Frances received when Gilbert died, because Brown gave me such keen insight into them both.

The Wakening of Minds, or the Cross of Gilbert

The Blogg family hosted a regular Sunday open house, initiated by their debate club. A friend invited the skinny, not yet famous, Gilbert Keith Chesterton to one. It was 1896. Frances was 27 and Gilbert was 22. He was immediately struck by her. “If I had anything to do with this girl,” he wrote, “I should go down on my knees to her.” He thought she had an “asceticism of cheerfulness” and was “sane.” He boasted of her that “when it comes to interior meanings, she’s all there.”

Gilbert found in Frances, and she in him, a kindred spirit. Brown titles the courtship chapter, “Forging a Partnership in Wonder.” Friends described them as innocent, and the two enjoyed an exchange of ideas that bore fruit in their writings. In this chapter, Brown places their published thoughts side by side to show their similarity of ideas. Although Frances was reported to repeat Gilbertisms the day after he concocted them, some of his written assertions echo what she wrote years earlier.

For one example, in 1900, Frances wrote an essay called “The Open Road” in The Parents’ Review: “I fancy we all remember the sensations of childhood produced by the knowledge that a  journey was about to be undertaken. The true meaning of packing, or ticket taking, of stations and porters, has perhaps never dawned on us since, but to the child, there is no doubt of the extraordinary significance of each act in connection with the exciting event.”

In 1909, Gilbert embellished this in All Things Considered: “And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences—things altogether of the mind.” For example,

we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains.

While Gilbert’s evocation of a child’s wonder is more thorough, Frances first penned their mutual teaching point. Of course, by the time Frances wrote her essay, she and Gilbert had known each other for several years. Brown suggests, “This pattern does not indicate a subsuming of one mind into the other, but rather to indicate the unfolding relationship and its powerful inspiration to both parties.” As Gilbert saw it, Frances drew him to the Cross; Gilbert aided Frances in the sharpening of her mind. They playfully argued with each other to batter down to the core of things.

Frances had quit her job at the Parents’ National Education Union (PNEU) when she married. She took up an alternative vocation—a calling—that included offering her talent to her husband’s more mammoth public persona. She kept in his shadow and offered him practical support and love that enabled him to focus on writing. She was ever-industrious, and pursued privately the same passions she had at the PNEU (which eventually invited her back to speak on education), possibly with more freedom. Her role in society broadened to include a rich social life and continuous tending to one or another sick person, the poor, and children.

She nursed Gilbert to life when he was in and out of a coma for half a year, lending him twenty more years before he died, over which time he converted to Catholicism and wrote The Everlasting Man and his Autobiography. (Among others Frances nursed is Gilbert’s debate foe and friend, H. G. Wells.)

The Cross of Childlessness, or the Joy of Children

Chesterton admirers will know some of the stories in which Gilbert gets lost without Frances or she badgers him to finish an article with the postman on the stoop. Their other struggles have been less publicized.

Frances told one of her secretaries that she wanted “seven beautiful children.” That she never received this gift, and her subsequent response to emptiness, is possibly the most moving aspect of her life. From my small perspective, it is where she approaches the heroic.

Ada Chesterton, Frances and Gilbert’s sister-in-law, wrote in her slanderous book, The Chestertons, published after the deaths of Frances and Gilbert, that Frances refused Gilbert “access to her bed and person.” While much, much later, Ada confessed to mistreating them, Brown notes that were Ada correct, Frances would have no need for her visits to infertility clinics, and three “Amazonian surgeries.”. Frances had problems with her thyroid and pituitary gland. Whatever the cause of their infertility, Frances’s operations did not fix it.

After Frances’s third surgery, Brown speculates, she and Gilbert must have made a pact. They no longer spoke or wrote of having children. They did not talk about adoption. As sources have it, they no longer mourned.

Instead, they opened their home to their nieces and nephews, and, over time, to as many as 25 godchildren. They started a theatre for children. When Frances spoke on children’s education, she insisted that children should act out their own plays as a formative aspect of their education.

Many of their secretaries also became like daughters. This was especially true of their final secretary, Dorothy Collins. Frances wrote to Dorothy:


There is an empty space that must be filled;

there is an empty room that needs a guest;

enter my daughter,

here you shall find rest.


Gilbert and Frances stood as godparents when Dorothy entered the Catholic Church. However much pain their infertility cost them, they spent it all on spiritual children.

The Strangeness of Conversion, or the Peace of Christ

Frances exhibited grit by her religious conversion. Independently, she moved to believe and love high Anglican teaching and worship. Her true embodiment of Christianity was one thing that drew Gilbert to her.

When Gilbert entered the Catholic Church in 1922, Frances did not join him. The splitting of paths was a scourge for them. Though as always, she supported him and he gave her space to come at her own pace.

Four years after Gilbert’s reception, Frances entered the Church. She wrote to Fr. O’Connor that “I am very happy—though the wrench was rather terrible—It was hard to part with so many memories and traditions. Pray for me please that I may make a good Catholic.” Brown comments, “Many people asked Frances over the years ‘who’ converted her to the Catholic faith. The expected response was, of course, her husband. Frances, however, always replied: ‘The devil.’”

Brown proposes that Frances Chesterton chose to be a kind of St. John the Baptist to G. K. Chesterton’s Jesus Christ. She decreased as he increased, and as he increased, he proclaimed the Gospel.

Brown waits until the epilogue to remind us that Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s cause for canonization opened in 2013. She proposes that Frances, to whom Gilbert wrote “you who brought the cross to me,” is yet “the saint beside the saint.” To which I can only say, we shall see. My college chaplain liked to remind his students that saints have saints for friends. Well, saints have saints for spouses, too.

Kathleen (Robinson) Torrey lives with her husband in Virginia. She holds a bachelors in folklore & mythology from George Mason University, and she tutors English. She also writes fiction and poetry.