Born to be wild

It was high time we had a proper look at the four beautiful, original Olivier sisters. Hitherto, with one exception, they have been seen in glimpses, playing marginal parts on the Bloomsbury stage after about 1910. The exception was the youngest, Noel, who all her life and since has been stuck with her invidious role as the girl who turned down a national hero, Rupert Brooke. Even Sarah Watling cannot help beginning and ending her solid, thoughtful book with that piece of the jigsaw. But admirably, if a trifle laboriously, she goes on to consider each of them as an individual, and succeeds in placing them firmly in the vanguard of the slow progress of women towards a measure of personal and professional freedom.

Their lives were not plain sailing. In some ways, this could even be seen as a cautionary tale: progress usually comes at a cost. Margery, Brynhild, Daphne and Noel, the four daughters of Sydney and Margaret Olivier, late-Victorian parents turned Fabian socialists, were considered by their contemporaries an alarming bunch. Born between 1886 and 1892, they grew up in the wooded hills around Limpsfield, Surrey, then still relatively untamed countryside, presided over by the literary Garnett family and known as Dostoevsky Corner — Constance Garnett being the first great translator of the Russian classics. The girls climbed trees in their blue serge knickers, swam in the muddy streams, built huts and tree houses, made fires and skinned rabbits. One of their playmates was Constance’s son David, always known as Bunny; they may not have skinned him but they unnerved him. It was he who later called them ‘cruel as savages’ and ‘ruthless Valkyries’ — perhaps because none of them was among his many conquests. Their nanny wondered ‘if all socialist infants are so exhausting’.

Encouraged to run wild, and separated from their parents for long periods while Sir Sydney, as he later became, went off to govern Jamaica, the girls formed close bonds, though sisterhood could be competitive and demanding.