Noble Savages by Sarah Watling is a group biography of the Olivier sisters all of whom were born in the late nineteenth century (they are distantly related to the actor with the same surname but he doesn’t feature in the book).
The sisters grew up in a liberal/neo-pagan household with plenty of money and a father who had colonial roles on behalf of the government. They had a childhood spent mostly out of doors, a free-thinking education and several of them then managed to go to university at a time when this was hard for women. They became involved with the Bloomsbury Group, befriending Virginia Woolf and also Rupert Brooke,
This was a time when life wasn’t always easy for intelligent and independent women but one sister became a doctor and another introduced a new form of educational thinking to the country and started her own school. They married and had children but there were divorces and love affairs and eventually mental health breakdowns. In older age they were pursued by biographers of the more famous of their friends and had to fight to refuse to allow their privacy to be endangered by publication of old letters.
There’s a lot of information about the four sisters so the author has chosen to tell their story in seven sections each at a different time in their lives. I’m not sure exactly how successful this is as she then has to recap anyway and I did feel that some things were completely omitted such as the time they spent in Jamaica when their father was Governor.
This is interesting in social history terms in that we are given a picture of the options and opportunities available to young women at this time and the barriers which faced them. I found the lives of the sisters fascinating but there were a lot of names in this book and a lot to take in from four busy and well-lived lives so sometimes it seemed a little overwhelming. I enjoyed reading it though.
Anne Is Reading 