When Rex met Edith: a meeting of minds in interwar England

Rex Whistler — this book’s ‘bright young thing’ — was an artist of the 1920s and 1930s, and Edith Olivier, the ‘bluestocking’, was a novelist. They both deserve to be more famous than they are, and Anna Thomasson’s absorbing joint biography will doubtless make them so. They met through Stephen Tennant in 1924, when Olivier was 51 and Whistler was a 19-year-old student at what he called ‘the darling Slade’. She was snobbish and he was talented; liking one another from the start, they bonded over hair. Once Rex persuaded Edith to exchange her spinsterish bun for a ‘bingle’ — a daring combination of a shingle and a bob — she never looked back.

Suitably attired, Olivier invited Whistler to her home, the Daye House in the grounds of Wilton. Here, in Arcadian surroundings, they became the central features of one another’s lives. While Edith morphed from a stern Victorian into what Thomasson calls ‘an honorary bright, if not young’, person, Whistler was happily out of step with the times.