Last month I wrote about writer Shirley Jackson, who thought about running away from home as she approached fifty. In one sense, it was impossible—physically, she didn’t have the strength to run a block and she suffered, in her later years, from agoraphobia. Whether Jackson could have escaped, mentally or otherwise, to a happier place was, in the end, a moot point. She died at 48, taking an afternoon nap.
The 1950s, when Jackson settled into the routines of adult life, was a particularly restrictive decade for women. I’ve written about British women athletes and the freedoms they enjoyed in the 1920s here, but lately I’ve been thinking of a group of fit women from a decade earlier. This summer, I took a bike ride with my partner from the Cambridge (England) train station to Grantchester, a small village just a few miles away. There we stopped at The Orchard, where British poet Rupert Brooke lived at the Old Vicarage before WWI. The posted history described Brooke and his friends taking long walks and swims in the nearby river Cam and Byron’s Pool in between writing sessions. One of those friends was writer Virginia Woolf, who dubbed the group the “Neo-Pagans” for their easy relation to swimming naked and, more generally, their association of outdoor life with mental rigour.
Essential to this group were four sisters, Margery, Brynhild, Daphne, and Noël Olivier. They were raised by progressive parents who allowed the girls to have roam freely around their home in Surrey. The youngest sister, Noël, attended the coeducational school, Bedales, which included daily runs in its curriculum. Noël went on to Cambridge University and refused Rupert Brooke’s offer of marriage, declaring her commitment to training as a doctor. She did eventually marry after completing her medical degree. Wisely, perhaps, she chose a fellow doctor, with whom she raised five children while working as a pediatrician.
Unlike Shirley Jackson, Olivier had a mother who encouraged her to live fully in her body, to find her strength and use it. The school that she attended developed her appreciation of outdoor life and physical activity while training her for university and a career. Unlike Jackson, Noël Olivier lived a long life.
The lesson here? Encourage your daughters to climb trees, both mental and physical.
(You can read more about Noël and her family in Sarah Watling’s 2019 biography, Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters.)
