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

(, Unabridged edition)

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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. PRAISE FOR A CURIOUS FRIENDSHIP "Reverent and sympathetic, and often fascinating" Independent "Provides a window on to a fascinating world, and the story is narrated with elegant verve" Guardian

Reviews

A Curious Friendship tells the story of Rex Whistler and Edith Olivier with haunting novelistic intensity - a remarkable first book. * Observer Best Books of 2015 *
I loved A Curious Friendship. Anna Thomasson, in her first book, has brilliantly captured this strange coterie. -- Sir Roy Strong
Provides a window on to a fascinating world, and the story is narrated with elegant verve -- Lara Feigel * Guardian *
Thoroughly researched, with elegant prose and a glittering cast of characters, Thomasson's account merges Victorian sensibilities with the raucous Jazz Age, giving the reader the best of both worlds. -- Lyndsy Spence * The Lady *
Reverent and sympathetic, and often fascinating -- Lesley McDowell * Independent *
Anna Thomasson tells her story well, her suggestions are shrewd, her prose pleasant, both are backed by much research. -- Mark Amory * Oldie *
Anna Thomasson is a wonderful writer, with a pitch-perfect ear and a marvellous sense of style. She knows her characters intimately with the result that one completely trusts her judgment every inch of the way. -- Selina Hastings
Moving, thoughtful, entertaining and magnificently researched, Thomasson's account of a bohemian art student and sharp-witted - sometimes comically snobbish - spinster is an outstandingly accomplished and original first biography from a writer for whom we can predict a very bright future. -- Miranda Seymour
Anna Thomasson has uncovered a remarkable story and brings these two fascinating but forgotten figures and their brilliant world vividly to light. An impressive debut. -- Julie Kavanagh
It is a vibrant, admirably researched debut, tinkling with famous artistic names. A non-fictional Brideshead Revisited, it's piquantly evocative of that lost aesthetic echelon of 1920s & 1930s society which dissolved amid the shadows of war; and the convention-defying friendship threaded through it is enthralling -- Caroline Sanderson

Author Bio

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.