The Olivier Sisters

Noble Savages

Winner of the Tony Lothian Prize for best first uncommissioned biography, Noble Savages reclaims the story of the four Olivier sisters, whose dramatic, interconnected lives span the twentieth century.

The best group biography of the year – of many years, in fact – is Sarah Watling’s Noble Savages, the story of the four Olivier sisters... Their mother was the model for Tess of the D’Urbevilles, their joint best friend was Rupert Brooke, and they had, said Virginia Woolf, strange glass eyes which they took out at night. But this is not why they are interesting. After feral childhoods in Surrey, where their parents lived in a Fabian utopia, each woman struggled with postwar realities: insanity, grief, poverty, catastrophic marriages. Elegantly structured in “seven fragments”, Watling’s book gives us a riveting drama that begins as pastoral comedy and ends as tragedy.

This is the first time [the Olivier sisters] have had a biography to themselves, and a very fine job Sarah Watling makes of it… thoroughly fascinating... This book is interesting on a dozen levels.

Four remarkable sisters born at the end of the 19th century, and I didn’t know about any of them before reading this utterly absorbing book in which their whole lives are laid before us. Their story has opened my eyes to whole new areas of early 20th-century British life.

In this compelling biography Sarah Watling tells [the Olivier sisters’] tale for the first time. It is the story of the end of Victorianism and the birth of the modern age. It is also, grippingly, the story of the early feminist movement, and a vital contribution to the construction of an alternative women’s history… [Watling] is quite brilliant.

A story of four girls rebelling against Edwardian stuffiness is vividly told… in this thoughtful, compassionate biography… I found much to celebrate and admire here.

In her highly accomplished first book Sarah Watling aims to follow [the Oliviers'] lives as a way of recovering what still feel like missing aspects of twentieth-century female life ... Watling is excellent on the way that biographers’ zeal for “uncovering” material facts and psychological truths about their subjects is really an attempt to claim authority for what are essentially acts of imagination... This does not mean, though, that Watling is willing to sacrifice the rich, enduring pleasures of biographical storytelling ... Watling deftly uses the Oliviers’ lives to reanimate the kinds of female experience that tend to lie inert inside grander narratives.

If the Bloomsberries lived in squares and loved in triangles, the Olivier sisters lived in tents and loved in Venn diagrams… Sarah Watling’s riveting book… is a noble endeavour and a laudable achievement.

This marvellous biography… shines a light on these four fascinating women [the Olivier sisters] – and the dramatic, pioneering lives they led.

Tatler *This summer’s best new books and holiday reads*

Watling vividly conjures up the sisters, but ultimately this is an exploration of the difficulty of knowing anyone truly, and how sisterhood makes it harder still… it renders them inspiring without flattening them into the bland ‘rebel girls’ stereotypes currently in vogue.

Sarah Watling’s expertly crafted portrait of the lives of the Olivier sisters manages to draw out of the archives not only vital threads of English cultural history but a sense of the risk of new biographical subjects being seen and heard for the first time. Watling is a highly sensitive curator and she handles her subjects with exquisite care, folding them back into the environments which made them and allowing us to visit them there. I read Noble Savages and I was reminded of the thrill of first reading the writings of ethnographer and explorer, Mary Kingsley.

Sarah Watling puts four remarkable twentieth-century lives in the spotlight with sympathy and lightly-worn scholarship. What trailblazers they were!

Watling’s book gives us a riveting drama that begins as pastoral comedy and ends as tragedy

*A NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR* 
*WINNER OF THE TONY LOTHIAN PRIZE* 
 
'Interesting women have secrets. They also ought to have sisters.' 
 
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. 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.

Sarah Watling

Glorious... The stories are so beautifully rendered, so powerful

A fascinating study... Watling's protagonists are flawed but brave, battling fascism with guts.

In her engrossing and impressive book, Sarah Watling looks at some of those women who went to war, not just to fight fascism or scratch the itch of adventure but also to show what women could do.

Provocative, compelling narratives of women on the front lines of fighting fascism... A powerful, moving cautionary tale for today.

Helen Zia, author of The Last Boat Out of Shanghai

Watling's study marks her determination to write women into the history books... This is a serious, scholarly work, which also brings her group of writers, poets and activists vividly to life.

A brilliant, impassioned, and much-needed tribute to the women who used their art to fight fascism... Extraordinary and captivating.

Watling's narrative, inserting vivid glimpses of the conflict to situate her shuffling of a deck of characters who themselves embodied complex and evolving ideas, is expertly balanced.

Fascinating... Sarah Watling brings alive with great vividness a small cast of disparate characters who travelled to Spain during the Civil War... Watling brings all these passionate characters together with great aplomb.

Watling deploys a wealth of firsthand testimony and archival materials, not in service of a conventional work of history but in an extended consideration of contemporary concerns.

In her exhilarating book, Sarah Watling follows a handful of brilliant intellectuals as they wrestle with the nature of duty in a morally complicated world.

Group biographies are notoriously hard to write. But Watling knits together with considerable skill... She also intersperses her narrative with perceptive commentary.

Fascinating and compellingly readable.

Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Holocaust

Beautifully written. It evocatively and incisively weaves together the experiences of a select group of remarkable women in war... This book is not only very readable but also thought-provoking... The resonance of the book in our conflicted world is all too evident, existentially and morally.

Brings the Spanish Civil War to freshly vivid life... She makes us feel their urgency as our own.

A corrective to those more publicised accounts from male writers reporting on the civil war... She's particularly fine on the question of confrontation or evasion when it comes to great evils, that writing in times of crisis is not for fence-sitters.

History that hums with the urgency of now.

An intimate and nuanced exploration of what animated and sustained a group of prominent foreigners who took sides in the mortal ideological struggle against fascism that was the Spanish Civil War.

Writers, Rebels and the Spanish Civil War

In our age of political divisions, this portrait of the women outsiders who took part in the Spanish Civil War asks questions of solidarity and resistance. 
 
'Glorious... so beautifully rendered, so powerful' 
ANNA FUNDER, author of Wifedom 
 
In the 1930s, women and men from across the world made their way to Spain to be part of what they saw as a historic fight for freedom from fascism. Tomorrow Perhaps the Future follows extraordinary outsiders who were determined to live out their lives with courage and conviction. 
 
Sarah Watling weaves together the experiences of a host of writers and activists, including Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn, Jessica Mitford and Virginia Woolf, and searches out the stories of the photographer Gerda Taro and the Harlem nurse Salaria Kea. Throughout, she explores solidarity, art and resistance, finding answers that are as vital today as they were almost a century ago. 
 
&lsquo;A fascinating study&rsquo; 
OBSERVER 
 
&lsquo;Engrossing and impressive&rsquo; 
NEW STATESMAN 
 
* A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR *

Sarah Watling

Praise for Tomorrow Perhaps the Future

Glorious... The stories are so beautifully rendered, so powerful

A fascinating study... Watling's protagonists are flawed but brave, battling fascism with guts.

In her engrossing and impressive book, Sarah Watling looks at some of those women who went to war, not just to fight fascism or scratch the itch of adventure but also to show what women could do.

Glorious... The stories are so beautifully rendered, so powerful

A fascinating study... Watling's protagonists are flawed but brave, battling fascism with guts.

In her engrossing and impressive book, Sarah Watling looks at some of those women who went to war, not just to fight fascism or scratch the itch of adventure but also to show what women could do.

Glorious... The stories are so beautifully rendered, so powerful

A fascinating study... Watling's protagonists are flawed but brave, battling fascism with guts.

In her engrossing and impressive book, Sarah Watling looks at some of those women who went to war, not just to fight fascism or scratch the itch of adventure but also to show what women could do.

Books by Sarah Watling

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