Brynhild Olivier (20 May 1887 – 13 January 1935) was one of four sisters noted for their progressive ideas, beauty and associations with both Rupert Brooke and his Cambridge circle of Neo-pagans, as well as the Bloomsbury Group.

Sydney Olivier, whose family was descended from French Huguenots,[3] was a leading Fabian (along with George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Graham Wallas), Governor of Jamaica (1907–1913)[4][5] and a minister in the first Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 (Secretary of State for India).

A. Hobson, the writers E. V. Lucas and Henry Salt and William and Margaret Pye, whose children included Edith, Ethel, Sybil and David.

[13][14][15] There, the four Olivier sisters led a free-spirited outdoor life, disdainful of social convention, which later made them very much aligned to the ethos of Rupert Brooke's Neo-pagans, building tree houses, referring to themselves as the Reivilo[b] tribe, and becoming very athletic in a manner that David Garnett compared to ancient Sparta.

For the next few years the sisters' lives were divided between England and Jamaica, keeping their mother company and performing official functions at Government House.

[28] Of the four sisters, Bryn was the only one not to successfully pursue higher education, abandoning her studies at the Royal College of Art, when her parents returned to Jamaica.

Although the women were closely chaperoned by Mrs Leon, a friend of Rupert's mother, he wrote excitedly back to his maternal cousin Erica Cotterill[e] of this encounter "There is One!...oh there is One!...aged twenty, very beautiful & nice & everything...I adore her".

In May of that year[38] Brooke met the rest of the Oliviers when the Cambridge Fabians gave a dinner in honour of Sir Sydney, at which both he and Lady Margaret, together with Margery, Daphne and Noël attended, while Bryn remained in Jamaica.

[10][41] In July 1908, Rupert Brooke's production of Milton's Comus at Cambridge brought in many of the Newnham women to assist, and Noël was also recruited to clean paint brushes.

The core group or inner circle being the four Olivier sisters, Justin Brooke, Jacques Raverat, Gwen and Frances Darwin and Ka Cox.

[g][50] In 1909, camping and the outdoor life was coming into fashion, and for undergraduates replacing the reading parties,[51] such as the one Margery and Noël attended at Bank in the New Forest at Easter that year.

Rupert Brooke was much taken by this trend and organised camping trips for his circle, travelling extensively in the summer months in both England and France, where Raverat had a chateau at Prunoy.

[59] As a core member of the Neo-pagans Bryn was one of those who thought up the group's solemn pact to reunite at Basel Station on 1 May 1933, to start a new life, and reject growing old like their parents.

She had tried painting and for a while was apprenticed to a jeweller in Kent with a view to opening her own studio but found the work hard on her eyes, and incompatible with the long summer vacations she had become used to.

Her mother was keen to keep her daughters close to her, and Bryn agreed to take Margery and Daphne's place in Jamaica when they returned to England in October.

[62] In August of that year, the Neo-pagans staged a performance of Marlowe's Faustus at Cambridge, in which Bryn was cast as Helen of Troy in a low cut robe and hair highlighted with powdered gold (see illustration), Brooke as the Chorus, Ka Cox as Gluttony and Noël was an understudy.

At the time, Virginia commented that Bryn "has a glass eye – one can imagine her wiping it bright in the morning with a duster", referring to a perceived insensitivity.

Instead she went rock-climbing with Hugh,[71] becoming increasingly exasperated with Brooke's emotional immaturity, confiding to James Strachey "He's evidently got to get through this – what ever this is, by himself...One comes away feeling baffled and exhausted".

Vanessa Bell was horrified, commenting to her sister, Virginia Woolf, that this was "too awful...she'll never be able to go away or hardly to leave the house...these young neo-pagan mothers evidently mean to do everything thoroughly".

On returning to London, Bryn was confronted by Margery at her home, having escaped from the asylum, and realised she was going to have to assume responsibility for the care of her older sister.

The Oliviers knew of an Irish doctor, Dr Caesar Sherrard (1853–1920), ho had a farm at Tatsfield, Surrey, where he cared for soldiers affected by shell shock by having them work the land.

[91] When the war ended in November 1918, Hugh was demobbed and returned to his job in London, while Sherrard went up to St John's College, Cambridge to read Natural Sciences.

Margery, who was in and out of nursing homes, also spent time with her parents in Ramsden, but continued to act out her paranoid delusions, attacking people she feared or suspected.

[98] Bryn now asked Hugh for a divorce, and with her parents, took the younger three children[p] and went to stay with her uncle, Herbert Olivier, at his home in La Mortola Inferiore, Italy.

[113] In the agricultural recession of the 1930s, Raymond Sherrard was unable to repay his debts, the farm did not prosper and they went bankrupt in 1933, while Bryn ran a milk round.

[116][6][117] Despite early promise, the venture rapidly foundered, and Bryn persuaded Sherrard to take a position as a scientist at the Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Oxford University,[118] some seventy miles away, returning at weekends.

In the summer of 1934, Bryn's father, who was paying her medical bills,[114] became increasingly disillusioned with the treatments she was receiving, and their side effects ("not only futile but vicious").

[123] He and Noël[x] decided to intervene by taking Bryn to Switzerland, initially to an alpine health resort at Kurhouse Val Sinestra and then to see Dr Carl Jung, meanwhile letting the farm.

Noël, alarmed, arranged for her sister to be transferred to St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, known for its research into Bryn's condition,[126] where she spent Christmas 1934.

They diagnosed aplastic anaemia and gave her blood transfusions from her family,[130] but she died in the hospital on 13 January 1935 at the age of 47 and was laid to rest in the churchyard at West Wittering.