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, The Guardian

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

In her highly accomplished first book Sarah Watling aims to follow [the Oliviers'] lives as a way of recovering what still feel like missing aspects of twentieth-century female life ... Watling is excellent on the way that biographers’ zeal for “uncovering” material facts and psychological truths about their subjects is really an attempt to claim authority for what are essentially acts of imagination... This does not mean, though, that Watling is willing to sacrifice the rich, enduring pleasures of biographical storytelling ... Watling deftly uses the Oliviers’ lives to reanimate the kinds of female experience that tend to lie inert inside grander narratives. – Kathryn Hughes, The New York Review of Books

Sarah Watling’s riveting book… is a noble endeavour and a laudable achievement. – Literary Review

A story of four girls rebelling against Edwardian stuffiness is vividly told… in this thoughtful, compassionate biography… I found much to celebrate and admire. –The Times

This marvellous biography… shines a light on … four fascinating women – and the dramatic, pioneering lives they led. – Francesca Carington, This summer’s best new books and holiday reads, Tatler

Watling vividly conjures up the sisters, but ultimately this is an exploration of the difficulty of knowing anyone truly, and how sisterhood makes it harder still… it renders them inspiring without flattening them into the bland ‘rebel girls’ stereotypes currently in vogue. – Mail on Sunday

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. – Vanessa Berridge, Daily Express

[A] welcome feminist counterblast. – Times Literary Supplement

Resplendent around the lives of the four sisters, and the lives of those whose destiny they marked (or sometimes marred), is the record – social, historical, literary – of an entire era, and Watling has an exceptional talent in intertwining the public with the private without compromise or infidelity to either. As a biography, complex and multiple at that, this is engrossing; as the retrieved stories of many lives, it is gloriously rich, immensely satisfying. As a reflection on the paths of feminism, female emancipation and professional praxis, it is rivetingly dramatic. – Mika Provata-Carlone, Bookanista

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