Noble Savages: The Oliviers: Four Women's Lives

From an early age, the Olivier sisters stood out: emancipated, attractive, determined and dangerously 'wild'. Poet Rupert Brooke was reportedly in love with all four, DH Lawrence found them repulsive. Virginia Woolf could not make head or tail of them.
The sisters were ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when some still thought that women's education was bad for the reproductive organs. Noel was already working as a doctor during the First World War; Daphne founded the first Steiner school in England; Brynhild excelled as a connecting link with the Bloomsbury group.
In Noble Savages, Watling places the sisters in the full light of history, offering insight into the early feminism of the previous century, the progressive political ideas of the time, the image of women in health care and the cultural landscape after the First World War. With supporting roles for men such as George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and CS Lewis, Noble Savages is first and foremost a portrait of sisterhood in all its facets.