My grumble back in 2006, when I started writing the scribbles, was how difficult it was, when you lived away from the centre, to find the good books to read and, though things have moved on a bit since then, I always seem to revert to one reliable source, Literary Review. I subscribed again last year on the basis that £3.18181818 a month (£35 a year for eleven issues) represented a good investment if I was to keep up to speed with what is out there.
Each edition arrives and there's a bit of a fight for it. Bookhound, who would agree that he is not really a reader of anything unless it involves fish or catching them, loves it because it saves him reading the whole book. He reports back to me because I tend to skim the reviews and head to the final verdict for fear of spoilers in the first instance. I won't read it properly until I have finished the book and written my thoughts here.
'There's a book in here that you will really love,' he said after reading the June issue.
Coming from him it's a fatal statement that can only have one outcome, because I then want the book yesterday so, any excuse for a trip to a bookshop, we head off and I come home clutching a copy of Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. It prompted that post about Sisters a while back and we had an interesting discussion about their proliferation in dedicated biographies like this.
Born at the close of the nineteenth century, sisters Margery, Daphne, Brynhild and Noel Olivier (Sir Laurence was a cousin and is barely mentioned) are raised as free spirits by parents who live and love by Fabian Society principles. The family are well-connected with in-crowd of the day which reads like something of a Who's Who of early twentieth century society... George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, Bunny Garnett, E. Nesbit and those connections expand as the girls get older to include Rupert Brooke (who was said to love all four of them, but in particular Noel) D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf (who couldn't get the measure of them at all). Meanwhile the sisters develop a seemingly unassailable solidarity...
'The thing about being an Olivier...was that there were four of them, so they could afford to discard outsiders, knowing that isolation would never be absolute.'
However, times are a-changing for women, their voices are being heard and they are 'asserting a claim in the public realm' and it is clear that there is a world waiting out there for the Oliviers and it must be explored and embraced.
There will be family diversions to Jamaica, where their father Sidney was the governor, but ambitions would set each daughter on a different path and in some cases blazing a trail in a world riven by post First World War chaos and uncertainty. The expected role of women will be to step back, to surrender and sooth the men, and far fewer of them, on their return from the Front.
Daphne will embrace the burgeoning educational philosophies of Rudolf Steiner and eventually set up one of the first schools in the UK.
Noel, against all the odds will train in medicine at a time when many hospitals were closing their doors to women medical students and doctors...
For all the free-thinking upbringing some things hadn't changed and it is Brynhilde who narrowly escapes being the designated daughter who will care for the emotionally demanding parents. Described as 'the great beauty of the four' Bryn will marry (twice) and raise a family that will include a daughter Anne. Anne would marry Quentin Bell and as Anne Olivier Bell go on to edit Virginia Woolf's diaries (among many other accomplishments)
And then there was Margery..
I'm guessing that 4/4 success stories would be too much to ask and sadly it is poor Margery who succumbs to mental illness and is hospitalised for many years. Sisterly solidarity is all well and good, and the motherly Brynhilde goes to extreme lengths to care for her, but Margery's obsessive, volatile and unpredictable behaviour when convinced that someone is in love with her, when really they are definitely not, will eventually lead to the family's heartbreaking and exhausted decision to have her committed into care.
Whenever I read a book like Noble Savages, whose timeline traverses those years of the First World War, there is always that sudden and overwhelming sadness in the run up that I know what is ahead and they don't. It still seems to be a fruitful source of investigation...everything seemed to be going so well...
'The present is amazingly ours, ' says Rupert Brook to Noel, ' we have inherited the world...'
Noel rejects Rupert Brook's desperate and obsessive love for her in the pre-war years and will have to live with that decision ever thereafter.
An historian with a master's degree in historical research writing her first book and you'd think there would be endless traps there for the falling into, but to my mind Sarah Watling has sifted and handled her information adeptly. By cleverly marshalling her narrative into seven distinct time frames, omitting those years when life trundles on, because I was left desperate to know how life had treated the sisters in the interim. What had changed, who'd had another baby, who was still married, who was off on a frolic of their own, who had escaped a difficult situation, all making for one very addictive and fascinating book. The book didn't leave my side for a week. Four women living through times of huge social and cultural change and, as a footnote to the book, I would add there is some interesting background information coupled with honest observations from Sarah Watling about the ethics of a biography like this, which had been resisted by the last remaining sister Noel for many years.
I'm interested too...how do you find out about the books you might want to read (apart from here occasionally)...
Do you rely on newspaper reviews...bookshop shelves...the library...
And what about biographies...are the famous fair game for a reader’s insatiable appetite to know, or should their reticence be respected.
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