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Centering the Olivier sisters in their own time, Watling presents a vivid and fascinating group portrait of sisters, sisterhood, and feminism in the early 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.
The play focuses on the lives of three sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, young women of the Russian gentry who try to fill their days in order to construct a life that feels meaningful while surrounded by an array of military men, servants, husbands, suitors, and lovers, all of whom constitute a distractions from the passage of time and from the sisters' desire to return to their beloved Moscow.
Rupert Brooke (b. 1887) died on April 23, 1915, two days before the start of the Battle of Gallipoli, and three weeks after his poem "The Soldier" was read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday. Thus began the myth of a man whose poetry crystallizes the sentiments that drove so many to enlist and assured those who remained in England that their beloved sons had been absolved of their sins and made perfect by going to war. In Fatal Glamour, Paul Delany details the person behind the myth to show that Brooke was a conflicted, but magnetic figure. Strikingly beautiful and able to fascinate almost everyone who saw him - from Winston Churchill to Henry James - Brooke was sexually ambivalent and emotionally erratic. He had a series of turbulent affairs with women, but also a hidden gay life. He was attracted by the Fabian Society’s socialist idealism and Neo-Pagan innocence, but could be by turns nasty, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic. Brooke’s emotional troubles were acutely personal and also acutely typical of Edwardian young men formed by the public school system. Delany finds a thread of consistency in the character of someone who was so well able to move others, but so unable to know or to accept himself. A revealing biography of a singular personality, Fatal Glamour also uses Brooke’s life to shed light on why the First World War began and how it unfolded.
Based on exclusive, unprecedented access, the definitive biography of Sir Laurence Olivier, the dashing, self-invented Englishman who became the greatest actor of the twentieth century Sir Laurence Olivier met everyone, knew everyone, and played every role in existence. But Olivier was as elusive in life as he was on the stage, a bold and practiced pretender who changed names, altered his identity, and defied characterization. In this mesmerizing book, acclaimed biographer Terry Coleman draws for the first time on the vast archive of Olivier's private papers and correspondence, and those of his family, finally uncovering the history and the private self that Olivier worked so masterfully all his life to obscure. Beginning with the death of his mother at age eleven, Olivier was defined throughout his life by a passionate devotion to the women closest to him. Acting and sex were for him inseparable: through famous romances with Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright and countless trysts with lesser-known mistresses, these relationships were constantly entangled with his stage work, each feeding the other and driving Olivier to greater heights. And the heights were great: at every step he was surrounded by the foremost celebrities of the time, on both sides of the Atlantic—Richard Burton, Greta Garbo, William Wyler, Katharine Hepburn. The list is as long as it is dazzling. Here is the first comprehensive account of the man whose autobiography, written late in his life, told only a small part of the story. In Olivier, Coleman uncovers the origins of Olivier's genius and reveals the methods of the century's most fascinating performer.
Paragon of youthful beauty, romantic symbol of a lost England, and precociously gifted poet, Rupert Chawner Brooke died in a hospital ship off the Aegean island of Skyros in April 1915, aged just 27. All England mourned his passing. But behind the glow of myth lies a darker reality. At the height of his promise a disappointment in love triggered a mental and physical collapse that brought his inner complexities to the surface. Letters reveal a man who was sexually ambivalent, misogynistic, anti-Semitic – and sometimes alarmingly unstable. This revised edition of Nigel Jones's admired biography, including an account of a previously unknown affair of Brooke's, reveals a more conflicted and troubled individual than the gilded Adonis of English literary myth.
Additions to the revised edition include an early anonymous newspaper account of Bloomsbury, and observations by Quentin Bell, Beatrice Webb, Gerald Brenan, Christopher Isherwood, Frances Partridge, and others.
"Dr. H. G. Baynes was a close friend and assistant to C. G. Jung. He introduced Jungian psychology to Britain and led the English Jungian community for twenty years, bringing greater public awareness to Jung's psychology through his writing, lectures and broadcasts." "Previously unpublished correspondence between Baynes and Jung as well as extracts from Baynes' journal while in analysis with Jung, are included."--BOOK JACKET.
Letters between the two men reveal their thoughts on politics, literature, and homosexuality, as well as their observations of such collegues and friends as John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, and Betrand Russell.
