‘Shocking flirts and disgraceful manners’

A fascinating biography of the Olivier sisters earns its place on the Bloomsbury shelf, says Lynn Barber

It was Bunny Garnett who first called the Olivier sisters savages. He’d grown up near them in Surrey, and wrote in his memoirs, “The four girls dominated my youth.

Usually rather serious and always noble in looks and manners and in attitude of mind, they could be as unthinkingly cruel as savages. Sometimes they were savages.” Rupert Brooke’s mother said “They’d do anything, those girls!” Shocking flirts, and their manners were disgraceful.”

The sisters crop up in various Bloomsbury memoirs, but this is the first time they have had a biography to themselves, and a very fine job Sarah Watling makes of it. Eldest sister Margery (born in 1886) was the clever one, Brynhild (born 1887) the dazzling beauty, Daphne (born 1889) the dreamy one, and Noël (born 1893), the most practical. Their parents Sydney and Margaret were leading lights of the Fabian Society, friends of the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw described Sydney as “handsome, and strongly sexed, looking like a Spanish grandee”. He worked in the Colonial Office and became Governor of Jamaica, and then was made a peer and became Secretary of State for India under the first Labour government.

The family lived in Limpsfield, Surrey, which Ford Madox Ford described as “the extra-urban headquarters of the Fabian Society”. The girls were homeschooled by a Swiss governess and the servants ate with the family. Their nanny, Gertrude Dix, who later became a successful novelist, wondered “if all socialist infants are so exhausting”. The girls mainly ran wild outdoors, building camps in the woods, killing rabbits,

climbing trees and swimming naked. They were utterly fearless and a source of envious fascination to other local children like Bunny Garnett, who thought of them as “ruthless Valkyries”.

In l900 Sydney summoned the family to join him in Jamaica where they were entranced by the beauty of the landscape but stultified by the formal dinners. Margery went back to England to read economics at Cambridge and Noël was sent to school at Bedales, joining Margery and her friends in the holidays.

One of the friends was Rupert Brooke, already a rising star, who fell first for Margery, then for Brynhild, and finally for Noël, when she was only 15. But although he pursued Noël off and on for four years, she remained cool. She once tried to define for him the Olivier character by saying that she and her sisters “can bear with all kinds of folk at first, extracting from them what is good until they are, as it were, boiled dry; whereupon we at last look at them critically and ... conceive for them a bitter contempt and ennui.” Many of their suitors complained of this essential hardheartedness in the Olivier sisters.

Noël, though the youngest, was the most determined and ultimately the most successful. She wanted to be a doctor, which was

NOBLE SAVAGES: THE OLIVIER SISTERS

Virginia Woolf wailed, ‘Why didn’t you marry any of those romantic young men? Why?’

not easy for girls, but she qualified in time to help wounded soldiers during the First World War. The fact that she was a doctor was useful when her eldest sister, Margery, started showing signs of psychosis. She believed that a friend of Lytton Strachey’s called Harry Norton was in love with her (which he wasn’t – he was gay) and kept tearing round Bloomsbury in hopes of catching him. Eventually she had to be confined to the family home, with a nurse, but when she became violent she was committed to an asylum where she spent the rest of her life. Noël, and also Daphne, spent many years trying to find a cure for Margery but without success. But Daphne, in the course of looking, got involved with Rudolf Steiner and his theories of anthroposophy and set up the first British Steiner school in Streatham. She married a fellow Steiner teacher and produced five children, starting when she was 36.

Brynhild tried to make a living as a jeweller but then succumbed to marriage to a long-standing suitor, Hugh Popham, who worked at the British Museum, and had three children. But she fell in love with another man, Raymond Sherrard, and got Popham to divorce her on grounds of her adultery. This was pretty shocking at the time – even Bloomsburyites never actually divorced, however much they changed partners – and it didn’t help that her father had just been appointed Secretary of State for India so it was all reported in the press. She married her lover and retreated to farm in Hertfordshire, but Sherrard was useless with money and she had to write to old family friends like HG Wells and GB Shaw to bail them out. Worn down by anxiety and poverty, she died of aplastic