I'd have loved a sister and spent a good proportion of my childhood praying/begging for at least one. I grew up with a brother, male cousins, male sons of my parents' friends and had to go out and find a girl-friend to swap Judy and Bunty comics with. That said, if there was a single upside to losing my brother when I was twenty-one it was that I gained a very lovely and special sister-in-law who I am still very lucky to have in my life. Mind you, I'm sure there are plenty of people who may not be as close to their sisters as they would wish, or as the rest of us sister-less folk might assume happens naturally.
But a new book came my way via the Literary Review and a trip to Waterstones and it's all made me think how many books I have on my shelves about famous sisters. The book in question is Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters, Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. This from the 'blurb'...
'From the beginning of their lives, the Olivier sisters stood out: surprisingly emancipated, strikingly beautiful, markedly determined, and alarmingly 'wild'. Rupert Brooke was said to be in love with all four of them; D. H. Lawrence thought they were frankly 'wrong'; Virginia Woolf found them curiously difficult to read.
The sisters seemed always to be one step ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought by some to be damaging to ovaries. Noel became a doctor; Daphne a pioneering teacher; Margery's promising trajectory was shot down by mental illness; Brynhild, the great beauty of the four, excelled as a Bloomsbury hostess yet gave it up for love and a life of uncertainty.
In this intimate, sweeping biography, Sarah Watling brings the sisters in from the margins, tracing lives that span colonial Jamaica, the bucolic life of Victorian progressives, the frantic optimism of Edwardian Cambridge, the bleakness of two world wars, and a host of evolving philosophies for life over the course of the twentieth century.
Noble Savages is a compelling portrait of sisterhood in all its complexities, which rediscovers the lives of four extraordinary women within the varied fortunes of the feminism of their times, while illuminating the battles and ethics of biography itself.
I've finished the book (splendid, more thoughts soon but I definitely commend it to the house) and it has all got me thinking just what a fruitful source sisters are for biographies. A quick run around my shelves and I'd found these without really trying and I'm sure there are more because I haven't even gone near Bloomsbury Corner or the Bronte Shelf...
A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders : The Macdonald sisters ...Alice (Kipling) Georgiana (Burne- Jones) Agnes (Poynter) and Louisa (Baldwin) who all started life among the ranks of the lower middle classes but would marry a poet, a painter, the President of the Royal Academy and a Prime Minister. I haven't read this but I will soon.
The Sisters - The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary Lovell. Jessica, Debo, Nancy, Diana and Unity.
Four Sisters - The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport. Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and Helen's book breathes light and voices into their world.
The Wild Wyndhams - Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton. Mary, Madeleine and Pamela, surrounded by the work of the Pre-Raphaelities, a family famed for its 'Bohemian closeness and whose lives 'were intertwined with some of the most celebrated and scandalous figures of their day.
If I looked harder I could probably find more but I'm going to leave further 'sisterly' reading suggestions to you...
Meanwhile just to balance things up I thought I'd put together a pile of books off my shelves about brothers...
Perhaps you have some suggestions there too...
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