Bohemian sisters of no mercy
THIS story of four bohemian sisters opens with a confrontation in 1962 between Noël, the youngest sister, and Christopher Hassell, biographer of Rupert Brooke.
The handsome 20- year- old poet had fallen in love with Noël in 1909 when she was 15 and visiting her eldest sister Margery in Cambridge. Noël’s response to Brooke’s ardour was confused but cool and the relationship was probably unconsummated before Brooke’s death from blood poisoning in 1915 on Skyros.
Hassell, as Brooke’s biographer, was desperate to get his hands on Noël’s letters from Brooke. She, however, was the source from hell, insisting on reading every word of Hassell’s biography and contesting every point.
Watling acknowledges that the Olivier sisters didn’t like being written about. Maybe they suspected that they too could fall prey to biographers because of their relationship with Brooke and their links with the Bloomsbury Group ( Virginia Woolf was godmother to one of Noël’s daughters). But this group biography left me with the faint feeling that the sisters only just bear such extensive scrutiny.
They were the daughters of Sydney Olivier, a colonial administrator, leading light in the Fabian Society, later Secretary Of State For India and a Labour peer. Their mother, Margaret, was the atheist daughter of a circuit judge, mathematician and writer. First cousins of actor Laurence Olivier, Margery, Brynhild, Daphne and Noël spent their early childhood alongside like- minded Fabians at Limpsfield in Surrey. There, they climbed trees and bathed naked in streams. Their late teens were rather different after Sydney became governor of Jamaica and they were expected to adapt to colonial society.
But Margery, a schizophrenic, was incarcerated for much of her adult life, her treatment often barbaric. Brynhild, the second sister, died in her 40s of a cancer now treatable, while Daphne also suffered from mental illness.
Noël, a mother of five, became a hospital paediatrician despite hostility from both men and women doctors. She died in her late 70s of a stroke. Margery outlived her younger sisters, dying in a geriatric ward in 1974.
Watling charts the women’s challenges over the first seven decades of the 20th century. She looks at the suffrage movement, in which the sisters participated, the strides made in recruiting women as doctors during the First World War and the reverses suffered when the men returned.
Despite my reservations about whether the sisters warrant a full biography, this is a well- researched slice of cultural history, giving poignant snapshots of a world scarcely recognisable. It is also a reminder that women’s rights should never be taken for granted.
tch