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Noble Savages
  • Published: 6 June 2019
  • ISBN: 9781473549333
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416
Categories:

Noble Savages

The Olivier Sisters

Formats & editions
EBook
6 June 2019
Paperback
6 Aug 2020
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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.

*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.
  • Published: 6 June 2019
  • ISBN: 9781473549333
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416
Categories:

About the author

Sarah Watling

Sarah Watling was the 2016 winner of the Tony Lothian Prize. She holds a degree in history from the University of Cambridge and a master’s degree in historical research from the University of London. Noble Savages is her first book.

portrait photo of Sarah Watling

Also by Sarah Watling

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future
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Praise for Noble Savages

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.

Sally Bayley

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

Virginia Nicholson

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.

Laura Freeman, The Times

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.

Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph

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.

Ysenda Maxton Graham, *Book of the Week*, Daily Mail

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.

Frances Wilson, Literary Review

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.

Elizabeth Lowry, Guardian