Sarah Watling

The Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939 inspired many people from Britain and other countries to become involved in the fight against fascism and to defend alternative possibilities (communism, socialism, anarchism or democracy). Tomorrow Perhaps the Future tells the stories of a number of women, mostly writers, mostly British or American, some well known, some forgotten, who went to Spain to fight, to help in the war effort or to report what was happening, or by campaigning for the cause in their own countries. The women featured in the book, all supporters of the Republican side in the war, include Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Salaria Kea, Nancy Cunard, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Jessica Mitford, Nan Green, Simone Weil (very briefly) and Gerda Taro. Some but not all of them were Communist Party members or sympathisers.

This is not really as one reviewer suggested, a "feminist history" of the war - that would presumably be a book about the history of Spanish women in the war, and I do have at least one such book - this is a biography/history of a group of outsider women, writers and rebels from outside Spain, their involvement in the war and how it affected their lives and writing. It is written from a perspective that is clearly feminist (and sympathetic to these women's political convictions).

The book is divided into three sections, reflecting the progress of the war, Beginnings, Arrivals and Retreat, and each chapter within those sections focuses on two or three women. They spent various amounts of time actually in Spain - Jessica Mitford and Simone Weil were not able to spend long there before being forced to leave, some made more than one trip, and Salaria Kea was there as a nurse with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Virginia Woolf never went to Spain, and seems to have been drawn in to the cause with some reluctance, partly through her beloved nephew Julian Bell, but she spoke at a fundraiser for Basque refugees, and struggled to write about how to deal with tyranny and war in her book Three Guineas.

I found this book fascinating and thought provoking. I want to reread the whole book again, and to follow up some of the stories by reading more about their lives and their published writings. I really felt the author's disappointment and frustration when researching Salaria Kea, who never completed and published her attempts at a memoir of her experiences, and whose story Watling had to piece together from fragments in archives. The book is readable yet scholarly. Black and white photographs are reproduced within the text with a list of illustrations and credits at the end, after the extensive footnotes and before the index.

Very highly recommended to readers interested in the Spanish Civil War and the participants in the struggle whose stories are told here.… (more)

People cared. It was a decade when people believed in the possibility of their own powers.

Josephine Herbst quoted in Tomorrow Perhaps the Future
In her introduction, Sarah Watling explains that “This is a book about individuals—outsiders—and how they understood their role in the history of humanity.” Tomorrow Perhaps the Future is a personal book more than a history or set of biographical portraits. It is Watling’s struggle to understand a “cluster of people,” women who understood what was at stake in the Spanish Civil War, and who were driven to become involved in the battle against fascism. And, it is about Watling considering the responsibility of activism, in the past and its implications for the future.

The women she writes about include the familiar and the famous, and women most of us have never heard of. Some were writers or photographers whose stories and photographs appeared in newspapers and magazines in the United States. One was a black nurse from Harlem. They were all outsiders, women who could speak the truth because of their unique perspective.

Through these women’s eyes we see the heroism of the Republican army, how people carried on in the midst of endless barrage and destruction. You understand the risks these women took to be at the front, embedded with the army or refugees, their personal losses.

And you understand the importance of this war, and the consequences of nations’ uninvolvement. For the Spanish Civil War was a trial run against the march of fascism across Europe, and soon after it’s end, Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.

Spain had democratically elected a Republican government, a coalition of left-wing groups. The right wing Nationalists, supported by the church and the military, tried to take over, and when they failed, they went to war with the Republicans. The Nationalists were supported by fascist Italy and Germany while the Soviet Union supported the Republicans. The country was divided, geographically and politically.

The war was pure chaos, with shifting fronts. It was a war that did not spare civilians; Picasso’s Guernica immortalized the destruction of a small village, filled with women and children as the men were all fighting in the war. The Nationalists asked the German and Italian fascists to bomb it.

As these women lost loved ones, I sorrowed with them. As they witnessed the hundred of thousands of refugees trudging to the closed borders, starving and without shelter or food or water, I was appalled. Concentration camps were created to house the refugees, with no protection, food, clean water, sanitation or medical help.

“I wanted to know what it meant to take a side and how it had been done, and I wanted to know what writing had to do with it.”

from Tomorrow Perhaps the Future by Sarah Watling
I learned so much about this war and these women. I was particularly intrigued by Salaria Kea who was a nurse, and Gerda Taro, who with her partner Robert Capa was a photographer, and who lost her life in the war.

Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free book.… (more)

Being connected is what these four sisters are famous for and why their names pop up in so many biographies and why this biography was written. It is sad and a bit dull because their lives did not turn out the way their early promise seemed to lead. Their father was well known and received a title for his work, the eldest daughter spent over forty years in a mental institution, another sister met Rudolph Steiner and that led her to start the first Steiner school in England, a third was a doctor when women faced horrendous obstacles in medicine and the last and most beautiful divorced at a time when fewer than 2000 women a year got a divorce and it was publicized in the paper and there was scandal. The doctor was loved by Rupert Brook the poet before his death in WWI and held his biographers at bay over his letters for her entire life. They knew all the rich and famous people of their time including Virginia Woolf, H.G.Wells, CS Lewis etc. They were traveled and educated and beautiful and had approximately 16 children between them. Their aunt wrote books and a Laurence Olivier was a cousin. David 'Bunny' Garnett grew up with them and loved them. They lived through two world wars and are remembered.

Blurb written by someone else:

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.

The sisters seemed always to be one step ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought by some to be damaging to ovaries. Noel became a doctor; Daphne a pioneering teacher; Margery's promising trajectory was shot down by mental illness; Brynhild, the great beauty of the four, excelled as a Bloomsbury hostess yet gave it up for love and a life of uncertainty.

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.

My comment:
Reading this because it links to so many other lives and diaries, letters, biographies I have read...the sisters are mentioned so often in other people's books that I decided to see what all the fuss was about and found the book dull. I plodded through it and thought that the Mitford sisters were so much more interesting. It was a bit depressing how these beautiful girls with so much potential and promise just seemed to dissipate it all and lose their way.

Blurb:
Margery, Brynhild, Daphne, and Noel Olivier were well-educated, socially privileged, precocious, striking, scandalous, engaging, and so closely knit that they were the objects of fascination and admiration both during their lives and long after. Here, Sarah Watling offers a group portrait of the sisters as they lived and negotiated the turbulent changes of the first half of the twentieth century, each one devoted to the other but choosing and pursuing her own extraordinary path. After a childhood spent in colonial Jamaica (where their father was governor), the sisters became members of the Neo-Pagan group that gathered around the poet Rupert Brooke in Cambridge, and helped orchestrate that group's encounters with Bloomsbury. Drawn first to Brynhild's oft-remarked-upon beauty, Brooke ultimately fell in love with the schoolgirl Noel, complicating the sisters' relationships for years to come. Noel would go on to become a medical doctor during World War I, Daphne to set up the first Steiner school in England. Watling brings the Olivier sisters from the margins to the main stage of history, providing a window onto early feminism, wartime, progressive politics, twentieth-century medicine's relationship with women, and post-war culture. A Who's Who cast of famous figures of the period rotates through the book--including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, C. S. Lewis, and Rudolf Steiner, as well as members of the Bloomsbury group, including Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes--but at the heart of it is a portrait of sisterhood in all its complexities and in all its personal and political guises. This is the first book to focus on the Oliviers themselves, and to do their rich story full justice.


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