The Olivier Sisters ― A Biography

Margery, Brynhild, Daphne, and Noel Olivier were well-educated, socially privileged, precocious, striking, scandalous, engaging, and so closely knit that they were the objects of fascination and admiration both during their lives and long after. Here, Sarah Watling offers a group portrait of the sisters as they lived and negotiated the turbulent changes of the first half of the twentieth century, each one devoted to the other but choosing and pursuing her own extraordinary path. After a childhood spent in colonial Jamaica (where their father, a baron, was governor), Noël would go on to become a medical doctor during World War I, Daphne to set up the first Steiner school in England, and Brynhild to become a prominent member of the Neo-Pagans, heavily influencing World War I poet Rupert Brook (though Noel would be the love of Brook's life). Watling brings the Olivier sisters from the margins to the main stage of history, providing a window onto early feminism, wartime, progressive politics, and post-war culture. A Who's Who cast of famous figures of the period rotates through the book--including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and the other members of the Bloomsbury group, including John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner, C. S. Lewis, and their first cousin the actor Sir Laurence Olivier--but at the heart of it is a portrait of sisterhood in all its complexities and in all its personal and political guises. This is the first book to focus on the Oliviers themselves, and to do their rich story full justice.

Sarah Watling holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of London. She is an independent historian and the recipient of the 2016 Biographers' Club Tony Lothian Prize. She lives in London.