A Curious Friendship: The Story of a Bluestocking and a Bright Young Thing

Author(s): Anna Thomasson

Biography & Memoir

The winter of 1924: Edith Olivier, alone for the first time at the age of fifty-one, thought her life had come to an end. For Rex Whistler, a nineteen-year-old art student, life was just beginning. Together, they embarked on an intimate and unlikely friendship that would transform their lives. Gradually Edith's world opened up and she became a writer. Her home, the Daye House, in a wooded corner of the Wilton estate, became a sanctuary for Whistler and the other brilliant and beautiful younger men of her circle: among them Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Tennant, William Walton, John Betjeman, the Sitwells and Cecil Beaton - for whom she was 'all the muses'. Set against a backdrop of the madcap parties of the 1920s, the sophistication of the 1930s and the drama and austerity of the Second World War and with an extraordinary cast of friends and acquaintances, Anna Thomasson brings to life, for the first time, the fascinating, and curious, friendship of a bluestocking and a bright young thing.


Product Information

Anna Thomasson studied for an M Phil in Biography at the University of Buckingham and her thesis was shortlisted for the Daily Mail Biographers' Club Prize. She lives in London and this is her first book.

General Fields

  • : 9781447245537
  • : Pan Macmillan
  • : Macmillan
  • : March 2015
  • : United Kingdom
  • : April 2015
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Anna Thomasson
  • : Hardback
  • : Unabridged Main Marked ed
  • : 823.912
  • : 432