Inklings
"Properly speaking," wrote Warren Lewis, "the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections." As was typical for university literary groups in their time and place, the Inklings were all male. 
Readings and discussions of the members' unfinished works were the principal purposes of meetings. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet", and Williams's "All Hallows' Eve" were among the novels first read to the Inklings. Tolkien's fictional Notion Club (see "Sauron Defeated") was based on the Inklings. Meetings were not all serious; the Inklings amused themselves by having competitions to see who could read the notoriously bad prose of Amanda McKittrick Ros for the longest without laughing.
Edith Tolkien
In a 1992 lecture, George Sayer recalled his friendship with the Tolkiens during the 1950s and '60s, "If I was there in the right time in the afternoon he would take me to have tea in the drawing room of the floor below, Edith Tolkien's room. The atmosphere was quite different, with hardly any papers and few books. She did most of the talking and it was not at all literary. Frequent subjects were the doings of the children, especially Christopher, the grandchildren, the garden in which I think Ronald enjoyed working, the iniquities of the Labour Party, the rising price of food, the changes for the worse in the Oxford shops and the difficulty in buying certain groceries. The road had deteriorated since they moved there. It used to be a quiet cul-de-sac. Now the lower end had been opened up and lorries and cars rushed through on their way to a building site or to the Oxford United's football ground. There were some very noisy people on the road. They even had as near neighbors an aspiring pop group. Ronald... told me that when she was younger Edith had been a fine pianist. Some of the conversation was about music. On one occasion she played to us on a very simple old-fashioned gramophone a record she had just bought. Her husband was relaxed and happy with this domesticity. Anyway, it was an important part of his life. Without a liking for the homely and domestic, he could not have written "The Hobbit", or created Frodo and Sam Gamgee, characters that sustain quite convincingly the story of "The Lord of the Rings", and link the high romance to the everyday and the ordinary."