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The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters
The great wits and beauties of their age, the Mitford sisters were immoderate in their passions for ideas and people, counting among their diverse friends Adolf Hitler and Queen Elizabeth II, Cecil Beaton and President Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh and Givenchy. As editor Charlotte Mosley notes, not since the Brontës have the members of a single family written so much about themselves, or have been so written about.
The Mitfords offers an unparalleled look at these privileged sisters: Nancy, the scalding wit who transformed her family life into bestselling novels; Pamela, who craved nothing more than a quiet country life; Diana, the fascist jailed with her husband, Oswald Mosley, during World War II; Unity, a suicide, torn by her worship of Hitler and her loyalty to home; Jessica, the runaway Communist and fighter for social change; and Deborah, the genial socialite who found herself Duchess of Devonshire.
Spanning the twentieth century, the magically vivid letters of the legendary Mitford sisters constitute not just a superb social and historical chronicle; they also provide an intimate portrait of the stormy but enduring relationships between six beautiful, gifted and radically different women who wrote to one another to confide, commiserate, tease, rage and gossip -- and above all, to amuse.
The Mitfords offers an unparalleled look at these privileged sisters: Nancy, the scalding wit who transformed her family life into bestselling novels; Pamela, who craved nothing more than a quiet country life; Diana, the fascist jailed with her husband, Oswald Mosley, during World War II; Unity, a suicide, torn by her worship of Hitler and her loyalty to home; Jessica, the runaway Communist and fighter for social change; and Deborah, the genial socialite who found herself Duchess of Devonshire.
Spanning the twentieth century, the magically vivid letters of the legendary Mitford sisters constitute not just a superb social and historical chronicle; they also provide an intimate portrait of the stormy but enduring relationships between six beautiful, gifted and radically different women who wrote to one another to confide, commiserate, tease, rage and gossip -- and above all, to amuse.
834 pages, Hardcover
First published November 6, 2007
About the author
Charlotte Mosley
10 books28 followersCharlotte Mosley, Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law, has worked as a publisher and journalist. She has published A Talent to Annoy: Essays, Articles, and Reviews by Nancy Mitford; Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford; and The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. She lives in Paris.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 237 reviews
January 11, 2008
I'm obsessed by the Mitfords, so I devoured this. How can you not be fascinated by a family where the six sisters were a Communist, a Fascist, a Nazi, a duchess, a novelist, and a farmer? All of them were hilariously funny -- OK, not so much Unity, the Nazi -- and brilliant. The only problem is that for a while after readomg ot. you'll find yourself talking like an upper crust 1920s eccentric. Oh darling, DO admit.
November 26, 2018
In Britain of the mid-Twentieth Century, there was a family of sisters named Mitford. Beautiful, brainy, and home-schooled, they emerged with strong characters and set out on very different life courses. Jessica, the leftist, eventually published her muckraking AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH about the American funeral industry. Nancy wrote numerous books, the best-remembered ones now being THE PURSUIT OF LOVE and LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE, essentially comic send-ups of her own upbringing and early adulthood. Diana was an outright Fascist of the 1930s; she and her husband were persecuted for it. Unity was of the right, too, but more a Hitler worshiper than an intellectual Fascist; she tried to blow her head off in a fit of erotomania but only partially succeeded. Pamela and "Debo" (Deborah) only wanted quiet, normal lives in an era not given to quiet or normalcy.
Thank heaven for the age of letter-writing. Will there ever be an epistolary blockbuster of nearly 900 pages written fifty years from now about communications between creative talents or family members taking place today? How? THE MITFORDS: LETTERS BETWEEN SIX SISTERS is not only an immense achievement, it's eminently readable not only for the respective sisters' courses in life, but for their pained, sometimes frustrated, attempt to stay on each others' wavelengths after leaving home. As are so many books, this one is a product of the great wave of "Mitfordiana" that began in the 1970s and to some extent continues even today. Confirmed Mitford-ites must have this book; others may want to invest in it once they start to comprehend how influential -- and funny -- these six "girls" could be. Individually, they were imposing. Together, they changed Interwar England.
Thank heaven for the age of letter-writing. Will there ever be an epistolary blockbuster of nearly 900 pages written fifty years from now about communications between creative talents or family members taking place today? How? THE MITFORDS: LETTERS BETWEEN SIX SISTERS is not only an immense achievement, it's eminently readable not only for the respective sisters' courses in life, but for their pained, sometimes frustrated, attempt to stay on each others' wavelengths after leaving home. As are so many books, this one is a product of the great wave of "Mitfordiana" that began in the 1970s and to some extent continues even today. Confirmed Mitford-ites must have this book; others may want to invest in it once they start to comprehend how influential -- and funny -- these six "girls" could be. Individually, they were imposing. Together, they changed Interwar England.
February 4, 2008
I got this book because it sounded interesting. Not interesting like, "I want to read that," but interesting like "I should read that." When I got it, I groaned. It was huge, 834 pages, and I figured I would start it and wander off about a quarter of the way through.
Boy howdy was I wrong. It was an incredibly engrossing book and I loved every minute of it. The six Mitford sisters, born between 1904 and 1920 started writing to each other in their 20's and continued throughout their lives. Four of them became authors, one moved to Germany and fell in love with Hitler and his party, one married the leader of the pre-WWII fascist party in England, one moved to the United States and became a communist and one ended up the Duchess of Devonshire. It was fascinating reading their views of history as it happened. The 1930's correspondence between Unity and Diana was particularly eye opening. I enjoyed this book so much and recommend it for anyone who likes history and reading other people's letters.
Boy howdy was I wrong. It was an incredibly engrossing book and I loved every minute of it. The six Mitford sisters, born between 1904 and 1920 started writing to each other in their 20's and continued throughout their lives. Four of them became authors, one moved to Germany and fell in love with Hitler and his party, one married the leader of the pre-WWII fascist party in England, one moved to the United States and became a communist and one ended up the Duchess of Devonshire. It was fascinating reading their views of history as it happened. The 1930's correspondence between Unity and Diana was particularly eye opening. I enjoyed this book so much and recommend it for anyone who likes history and reading other people's letters.
October 16, 2014
Cured of any budding fascination I might have had for the Mitfords. Feeling exhausted and longing for my sane, sensible sister who has never uttered words like "Oh isn't the Fuhrer just the kindest man ever!" Also, she has never tried to have me imprisoned. All good things. Must get her something nice for Christmas.
July 4, 2010
really don't know where to begin in reviewing this stupendous work. I am fascinated by the Mitfords - and I have read several books about them or by them. These wonderful letters between the six sisters are a chronicle of a century - Nancy born 1904 and Diana died 2003. The letters chart the changing relationships between the sisters. The vast differences between them, and the things which united them. It is through their eyes and in their own peculiar Mitfordian language that we expierence: Diana's imprisonment, Unity's death, Pamela's country life, Nancy's cruel wit, Decca's life in California and Debo's life at Chatsworth. Many of the stories are familiar to us, but they are given an added poignancy for being in their own words. It is typical of all families I think that they should sometimes talk of one sister to another - sometimes with concern, often in complaint. In their company we meet so many famous names among them:: JFK, The Queen, Princess Di, Evelyn Waugh, as well as a host of reletives, friends and servants. There are a lot of wonderful photographs in this volume which I nearly wore out looking at them, trying to get a sense of that moment captured on film - my favourites are, for some reason - Decca in her 60's playing Boggle with her second husband and Maya Angelou and one of Nancy standing on the steps of rue Monsieur in 1952.
August 30, 2020
I do find the Mitford sisters endlessly fascinating; of course, with such widely disparate political views, nobody is going to like all of them, and some of the letters leave a rather bad taste, but the are so interesting.
Shelved as 'finish-someday'
December 7, 2011If you want to appreciate this collection from cover to cover, you have to know a lot more about the Mitford girls than I would ever care to know. I shall be plucking juicy tidbits until I've had my fill.
(I'm still reading this, but moving it to my "finish someday" shelf. I own it, so it's going to take me months and months to get through it.)
(I'm still reading this, but moving it to my "finish someday" shelf. I own it, so it's going to take me months and months to get through it.)
October 9, 2014
I've read nearly all of the extant biographies and autobiographies of the six Mitford sisters, all of their fiction and nonfiction, and countless articles by and about them. I've been fascinated by their dazzling, batty world for several decades, ever since a college English professor had us read Jessica Mitford's "Way of Death," followed by Nancy's "U and Non-U" essay. That got me far enough down the delightful rabbit hole that is their writing and their lives, and I've not been back since.
That made this 800+ page book of the letters between them, over a period of 80 years, more of a treat than anything else I've read in the Mitford oeuvre. It's their lives, in real time, in their own inimitable language. All the nicknames, neologisms, and turns of phrase are razor-sharp in their casual private correspondence; it's even better than the editor-polished work nearly all of them contributed during their lives. Diana's granddaughter-in-law is editor and copious footnoter, so one does not feel lost in the private jokes or the cast of thousands.
Some of my favorites: Diana to Deborah, on Harold Macmillan's funeral: "What a terrifying sermon...saying on resurrection morning we shall all see him again. If THAT comes true it will give me a turn I don't mind saying. It was on the wireless and sounded like a threat." Or: "I must admit 'the Mitfords' would madden ME if I didn't chance to be one."
But Diana says it best when she describes reading her dear friend Evelyn Waugh's published letters: "As to Evelyn's letters there's a gem on every page & I am miserable to have finished the lovely great book." This book is exactly the same, and I'm miserable to have finished-- I felt bereft when Diana's death in 2003 closed the correspondence.
If you have any interest in this extraorder family, read one of the biographies first to get the story, put aside your aversion to some of their extreme political proclivities, and you'll enjoy a charming, hilarious ride at the elbows of some of the most notable 20th century historical figures, among them Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother, Cecil Beaton, Adolf Hitler, President Kennedy; the Mitfords walked among them. The letters are funny, shocking, touching, and compelling. One wishes the other 90% that didn't make the book were somehow available--perhaps another volume someday? I've gone on long enough. Go read.
That made this 800+ page book of the letters between them, over a period of 80 years, more of a treat than anything else I've read in the Mitford oeuvre. It's their lives, in real time, in their own inimitable language. All the nicknames, neologisms, and turns of phrase are razor-sharp in their casual private correspondence; it's even better than the editor-polished work nearly all of them contributed during their lives. Diana's granddaughter-in-law is editor and copious footnoter, so one does not feel lost in the private jokes or the cast of thousands.
Some of my favorites: Diana to Deborah, on Harold Macmillan's funeral: "What a terrifying sermon...saying on resurrection morning we shall all see him again. If THAT comes true it will give me a turn I don't mind saying. It was on the wireless and sounded like a threat." Or: "I must admit 'the Mitfords' would madden ME if I didn't chance to be one."
But Diana says it best when she describes reading her dear friend Evelyn Waugh's published letters: "As to Evelyn's letters there's a gem on every page & I am miserable to have finished the lovely great book." This book is exactly the same, and I'm miserable to have finished-- I felt bereft when Diana's death in 2003 closed the correspondence.
If you have any interest in this extraorder family, read one of the biographies first to get the story, put aside your aversion to some of their extreme political proclivities, and you'll enjoy a charming, hilarious ride at the elbows of some of the most notable 20th century historical figures, among them Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother, Cecil Beaton, Adolf Hitler, President Kennedy; the Mitfords walked among them. The letters are funny, shocking, touching, and compelling. One wishes the other 90% that didn't make the book were somehow available--perhaps another volume someday? I've gone on long enough. Go read.
Shelved as 'did-not-finish'
November 19, 2012I love the novels of Nancy Mitford, so when someone recommended this book to me I immediately got it from Amazon. It arrived a few days ago. Sadly it is going to leave my house practically unread. I found that the rabid adoration of Hilter and Nazism of some of the Mitford sisters really stuck in my gullet, rendering the book hugely distasteful. Up until now it had just been an issue in the background, dampened by the glory of Nancy's wonderful novels. But these letters show with undoubted clarity the level of their enthusiasm.
So, this new arrival to the house is going to make a fast exit.
Note: Nancy seems to have been pretty upset by her sisters' activities as well:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3...
So, this new arrival to the house is going to make a fast exit.
Note: Nancy seems to have been pretty upset by her sisters' activities as well:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3...
January 17, 2017
This is a 77-year correspondence, which naturally becomes both a portrait of the personalities of and relationships between the six Mitford sisters, and a fascinating view on the times they lived through, and threw themselves into. It's huge, and thought-provoking, and delightful, and sometimes greyly disheartening and sometimes desperately sad and sometimes just so charming you could live in it.
The key points of the Mitford story are that they were peers' daughters who came of age in the twenties, thirties and forties, and were almost never out of the papers. One eloped and ran away to be a communist in the Spanish Civil War, one became enamoured of and very close to Hitler and attempted to kill herself when England and Germany declared war, one became a fascist and was imprisoned during WWII on suspicion of being a threat to national security, one traipsed around Europe with her dogs and female companions, memorising every meal she ate, one became a bestselling novelist who immortalised the sisters' childhood, and one, the youngest and only surviving Mitford, is the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. That soundbite version of each of them is to a certain extent encouraged by one stylistic conceit (a helpful one when you're reading) in this book, whereby the author of each letter is signaled not just by their name but by an icon: a quill for Nancy the writer, crossed cutlery for Pamela, a half-moon which I assume is some kind of symbol of fascism (?) for Diana, a swastika for Unity (really), the communist hammer and sickle for Jessica, and a coronet for Deborah.
All six sisters shared a sort of linguistic quickness and fluidity that expressed itself in the letters in made-up or idiosyncratically stretched words like extraorder and nevair and wondair and shared phrases like I die for it and Do admit and endless nicknaming and just this ease of picking up and dropping jokes and keeping references running for a few letters and teasing one another. They also all shared a stiff-upper-lip flipness in the face of their own heartbreak and tragedy, and a greater or lesser tendency to tease and laugh in the face of other people's misfortunes and other people's or their own self-importance. And obviously they all shared a particular yen for extraordinary doings and convention-flouting. Even Deborah, who lived the most exemplary life of the six, started her grown-up life by suing a newspaper for damaging her marriage prospects by wrongly printing that it was Debo, rather than Jessica, who had eloped. (Then she went on to marry the future Duke of Devonshire, although he was a younger son at the time.)
Debo's is the voice that emerges as the most engaging, at least to me. She has this amazing strain of irreverence to her, which is especially heightened by the way she spent most of her life negotiating terribly exalted company. She was the most conflict-avoidant of the six of them - there's one angry passive-aggressive letter she writes to Nancy at one point, followed the next morning by a really darling apology letter - and she seems to have negotiated all those state dinners and Buckingham garden parties without any sensationalist scandals or shocking turns, but with the most amazing unhurtful delighted mockery. She was also the most prone to nicknaming of them all, possibly. A couple of high-profile examples: JFK, who was a close friend of Debo's, once called her up on Thanksgiving to ask if she had all her loved ones around her, which she found so charming and hilarious as a phrase that she referred to him as The Loved One from then on. And she referred to the Queen Mother all her life as Cake, after a wedding at which on being told the bride and groom were about to cut the cake, she had exclaimed "Oh, the cake!", delighting Debo forever.
Diana's letters were my least favourite. She felt, somehow, much more conventional than Debo, even though she was actually massively more shocking. She left her husband to be closer to her married lover, became an avid fascist and fervent supporter of Hitler, was imprisoned during the war, and was also a rather spikily opinionated atheist all her life. But she was the most sentimental of them, the least likely to bury her emotions behind walls of humour and staunchness (and the least funny), and certainly the most tenderhearted - and that tenderheartedness manifested itself in a slightly hypocritical sweetness. A constant refrain from her throughout the letters is to bring up some past hurtful thing another of her sisters did, and assert that she's over it and she doesn't mind anymore, but it really was awfully hurtful, and isn't she large-minded to not mind it anymore? She seems to have built her character around being the forgiving and sweet one, which meant that when she was actually desperately angry at somebody, she could only express it in sly digs to third parties.
Jessica (Decca) went straight from the Spanish Civil War to America, and only ever returned to England for visits. Where Debo avoided conflict, Decca seems to have run at it full-tilt. She was definitely the most bullish of the six, and in America, especially in the early years, she desperately and deliberately rejected everything about her class and background that she could. She cultivated a sort of deliberate brashness of vocabulary and manner, shaving off the refinements, and dotted her letters with abbreviations and forthright Americanisms.
Nancy, on the other hand, took a sort of perverse delight in conflict that she could observe from an observer's perspective. She took the Mitford laughing-at-serious-topics habit to the greatest extreme - her callousness frequently horrified Diana - and she was also the sharpest wit of the six of them. Her letters are always amusing, but usually not very safe.
Unity is the most infamous of them. Unity is the one your mother knows about, the one who crops up as references to the crazy British girl who was in love with Hitler. She died young (several years after the suicide attempt that gave her brain damage, of complications related to the bullet wound), so you never get to see what kind of personality she would have developed into. But even though her letters stop 200 pages into this 800 page book, she makes a decided impression. She writes with expression and force, a sort of mixture of poeticism and a bulldog attention to real-world events and details. She seems as though she must have had so much presence, it's hard to imagine her attaching herself as a satellite to somebody with, reportedly, so much more of it. But clearly she did, because what her letters are, overwhelmingly, is fannish. The way she writes about Hitler, about dinners and conversations with him and about him, all He put his hand on my shoulder twice & on my arm once and There was a choice of two soups & he tossed a coin to see which one he would have, & he was *so* sweet doing it and of her mother meeting Hitler, Having so little feeling she doesn't feel his goodness & wonderfulness radiating out like we do; it's not a girl in love, not really, it's a girl in the grips of fannish adoration. And not in an ignorant way - she swallowed all the propaganda about so-and-so "committing suicide" and such, but she knew very well what antisemitism meant and that people were getting hurt. She has Nancy's callousness combined with a fierce idealism, and it's ... fascinating and attractive and awful and really really sad. She was this little girl who used to hide under the table when she was upset, and was expelled from half a dozen schools for wildness, and her sisters called her Birdie, and she grew up to be a Nazi and she never became anything else, because she shot herself.
Pamela, called Woman by everybody, including her mother, is the hardest sister to get a handle on. She wrote far fewer letters than the others, and those she did were apparently largely filled with detailed accounts of the meals she'd cooked or eaten, so even fewer of them appear in this collection. She apparently suffered from polio in childhood, which affected her intellectual growth, enough to be noticible in this very quick family, and she was the most teased of them, especially by Nancy. But they agreed that she liked to be ragged on, enjoyed the attention, and certainly she always seemed to take it in stride. They definitely took delight in her eccentricities, and related stories to each other of "Woman's sagas", and Woman's conquests and social arrangements. They used the word "wondair" for her more than for anything else, and it didn't exactly mean wonderful but it did, too, wondering and fond and amused and perhaps a little appalled. She doesn't seem to have been shy or retiring - the stories her sisters relate to each other about her are always full of her browbeating somebody or other into arranging things to her benefit, or matter-of-factly ignoring important people - but she almost never waded into the family conflicts. She was quite self-sacrificing - she was the one who took on the care of Diana's children when Diana was in prison, and she cared for Nancy for long stretches while she was dying slowly of cancer - but she doesn't seem to have romanticised or derived any enjoyment from martyred devotion to others in the way that Diana, for example, sometimes did. (And she wasn't good at taking care of Diana's children; she was terribly unmaternal.) Really she seems to have just wanted to be able to tramp around doing her own thing.
Nancy's most complicated relationship was with Diana, whom she was always a little jealous of - for her beauty and popularity and children (which Nancy couldn't have) and for being loved. She actually denounced Diana to the government as a dangerous personage, when approached about it, before Diana's incarceration (which Diana didn't know till after Nancy's death). She was also closest to Diana, though; at one point they both lived for an extended time in Paris, and they spoke on the phone every morning and spent large portions of their time together. She had a freer and easier relationship with Jessica, once Jessica mellowed enough to not write Nancy off entirely as a de Gaulle supporter, than any of the others did. Partly because they saw eye to eye on their upbringing (desperately unfair they hadn't got a proper school education) and the shortcomings of their mother (vehemently denied by their other sisters), and partly because, I think, both of them were thicker skinned than the others, and the stakes in their relationship weren't so high as Nancy's with Diana, or Decca's with Debo and Unity, and there was no need for eggshell-walking around each other. And it was also partly because Nancy rather enjoyed it when Jessica stirred up conflict, I think, because Nancy's sense of humour swung that way. But her relationship with Debo was the one that was the most charming to read in letters. She addressed Debo as "9" (her mental age according to Nancy), and Debo addressed her as "Get on". Deborah was witty enough to be a worthy opponent for Nancy's wit, keenly appreciative of the ridiculous and ironically self-aware enough not to get hurt, but also sweet-nature enough that their exchanges could never turn mean, despite Nancy being Nancy.
Deborah and Diana had the closest relationship for the longest time - decades long. They agreed on all important matters, although whenever you read a letter in which Diana brings up politics or fascism or Hitler, Deborah entirely ignores it in her response. Diana and Unity, on the other hand, had the closest relationship when it made the most difference. They were the only two who could share their ardent devotion to Hitler and fascism, and they wrote and wrote to each other in those couple of years leading up to WWII, long letters full of painstakingly detailed accounts and encounters, and overflowing with ardent declarations.
Diana and Jessica are estranged from the moment they each discover politics, and there are little hurty references to how much Jessica had loved Diana but considers her the enemy now, and how much baby Decca and Debo had been Diana's absorbing interest and joy when she was a girl herself.
But it's Debo and Decca's relationship that is the most heartbreaking. As children they were the two youngest, and they had an invented language called Honnish, whose terms creep into the adult vocabulary of all the Mitfords. Deborah was devastated when Jessica ran away without saying anything, leaving her desperately lonely and increasingly unhappy, living with her parents and then with her mother and brain-damaged sister (Unity after the suicide attempt). Her letters to Jessica are full of brave cheer and pleas for her closest sister to write back. Jessica, meanwhile, was full to the brim of her new life and her new cause and her new love, with more to do than any day could hold, and her letters in the period after her elopement are brief and rather careless. They don't meet again for years, gradually growing further and further apart as Debo develops her own life and absorbing interests and Jessica's own interests pull further and further from her sisters'. When they finally do - Deborah goes to visit her, despite lukewarm encouragement from Jessica, who seems to have been deeply conflicted at the time about her sisters in general and her peeress sister coming to look at her life in particular - it's even more discouraging to read. Deborah is crushed by the changes in Jessica, the brashness and the aggressive speechifying, and they have almost nothing to talk to each other about. Later things get better, Decca mellows and Debo gets over some of her disillusioned little-sister worship, and they have several visits where they're good friends. But Deborah continues to nurse the memory of Jessica's abandonment as the worst moment of her life, which Jessica never seems to have been able to understand or believe - at one point they have a heart-to-heart conversation about it, blowing Jessica's mind, and she writes later that she thinks Debo must be misremembering: that they were close but not that close, despite their shared language, and it was more Decca and Unity who were inseparable, at that stage. (Jessica represents this even more strongly in her memoir Hons and Rebels, which is full to the brim with her difficult and heartbreaking love for Unity but barely mentions a relationship with Debo at all.)
Jessica and Unity's relationship is remarkable. Diana, the idealised older sister, Jessica repudiated forever for her fascism. But Unity, the next youngest after Jessica, with whom Jessica also had a made-up language (Bowdledidge), she continued to write to and profess her love for as long as they were both alive. Their violently conflicting politics shook them, definitely, and there's one exchange of letters which I can't find to quote, but in which they agree that if they ever meet on the field of conflict, they will of course have to kill each other. But they seem to have been able to carve out this space of love and respect that was separate to that.
There are all these other thoughts this book made me have, but we are already well past the point where this review is actually serving a useful purpose for people who aren't me, and I'm pretty sure nobody is reading by this point anyway. So I'll just say I AM SO IN LOVE WITH THIS BOOK. There.
The key points of the Mitford story are that they were peers' daughters who came of age in the twenties, thirties and forties, and were almost never out of the papers. One eloped and ran away to be a communist in the Spanish Civil War, one became enamoured of and very close to Hitler and attempted to kill herself when England and Germany declared war, one became a fascist and was imprisoned during WWII on suspicion of being a threat to national security, one traipsed around Europe with her dogs and female companions, memorising every meal she ate, one became a bestselling novelist who immortalised the sisters' childhood, and one, the youngest and only surviving Mitford, is the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. That soundbite version of each of them is to a certain extent encouraged by one stylistic conceit (a helpful one when you're reading) in this book, whereby the author of each letter is signaled not just by their name but by an icon: a quill for Nancy the writer, crossed cutlery for Pamela, a half-moon which I assume is some kind of symbol of fascism (?) for Diana, a swastika for Unity (really), the communist hammer and sickle for Jessica, and a coronet for Deborah.
All six sisters shared a sort of linguistic quickness and fluidity that expressed itself in the letters in made-up or idiosyncratically stretched words like extraorder and nevair and wondair and shared phrases like I die for it and Do admit and endless nicknaming and just this ease of picking up and dropping jokes and keeping references running for a few letters and teasing one another. They also all shared a stiff-upper-lip flipness in the face of their own heartbreak and tragedy, and a greater or lesser tendency to tease and laugh in the face of other people's misfortunes and other people's or their own self-importance. And obviously they all shared a particular yen for extraordinary doings and convention-flouting. Even Deborah, who lived the most exemplary life of the six, started her grown-up life by suing a newspaper for damaging her marriage prospects by wrongly printing that it was Debo, rather than Jessica, who had eloped. (Then she went on to marry the future Duke of Devonshire, although he was a younger son at the time.)
Debo's is the voice that emerges as the most engaging, at least to me. She has this amazing strain of irreverence to her, which is especially heightened by the way she spent most of her life negotiating terribly exalted company. She was the most conflict-avoidant of the six of them - there's one angry passive-aggressive letter she writes to Nancy at one point, followed the next morning by a really darling apology letter - and she seems to have negotiated all those state dinners and Buckingham garden parties without any sensationalist scandals or shocking turns, but with the most amazing unhurtful delighted mockery. She was also the most prone to nicknaming of them all, possibly. A couple of high-profile examples: JFK, who was a close friend of Debo's, once called her up on Thanksgiving to ask if she had all her loved ones around her, which she found so charming and hilarious as a phrase that she referred to him as The Loved One from then on. And she referred to the Queen Mother all her life as Cake, after a wedding at which on being told the bride and groom were about to cut the cake, she had exclaimed "Oh, the cake!", delighting Debo forever.
Diana's letters were my least favourite. She felt, somehow, much more conventional than Debo, even though she was actually massively more shocking. She left her husband to be closer to her married lover, became an avid fascist and fervent supporter of Hitler, was imprisoned during the war, and was also a rather spikily opinionated atheist all her life. But she was the most sentimental of them, the least likely to bury her emotions behind walls of humour and staunchness (and the least funny), and certainly the most tenderhearted - and that tenderheartedness manifested itself in a slightly hypocritical sweetness. A constant refrain from her throughout the letters is to bring up some past hurtful thing another of her sisters did, and assert that she's over it and she doesn't mind anymore, but it really was awfully hurtful, and isn't she large-minded to not mind it anymore? She seems to have built her character around being the forgiving and sweet one, which meant that when she was actually desperately angry at somebody, she could only express it in sly digs to third parties.
Jessica (Decca) went straight from the Spanish Civil War to America, and only ever returned to England for visits. Where Debo avoided conflict, Decca seems to have run at it full-tilt. She was definitely the most bullish of the six, and in America, especially in the early years, she desperately and deliberately rejected everything about her class and background that she could. She cultivated a sort of deliberate brashness of vocabulary and manner, shaving off the refinements, and dotted her letters with abbreviations and forthright Americanisms.
Nancy, on the other hand, took a sort of perverse delight in conflict that she could observe from an observer's perspective. She took the Mitford laughing-at-serious-topics habit to the greatest extreme - her callousness frequently horrified Diana - and she was also the sharpest wit of the six of them. Her letters are always amusing, but usually not very safe.
Unity is the most infamous of them. Unity is the one your mother knows about, the one who crops up as references to the crazy British girl who was in love with Hitler. She died young (several years after the suicide attempt that gave her brain damage, of complications related to the bullet wound), so you never get to see what kind of personality she would have developed into. But even though her letters stop 200 pages into this 800 page book, she makes a decided impression. She writes with expression and force, a sort of mixture of poeticism and a bulldog attention to real-world events and details. She seems as though she must have had so much presence, it's hard to imagine her attaching herself as a satellite to somebody with, reportedly, so much more of it. But clearly she did, because what her letters are, overwhelmingly, is fannish. The way she writes about Hitler, about dinners and conversations with him and about him, all He put his hand on my shoulder twice & on my arm once and There was a choice of two soups & he tossed a coin to see which one he would have, & he was *so* sweet doing it and of her mother meeting Hitler, Having so little feeling she doesn't feel his goodness & wonderfulness radiating out like we do; it's not a girl in love, not really, it's a girl in the grips of fannish adoration. And not in an ignorant way - she swallowed all the propaganda about so-and-so "committing suicide" and such, but she knew very well what antisemitism meant and that people were getting hurt. She has Nancy's callousness combined with a fierce idealism, and it's ... fascinating and attractive and awful and really really sad. She was this little girl who used to hide under the table when she was upset, and was expelled from half a dozen schools for wildness, and her sisters called her Birdie, and she grew up to be a Nazi and she never became anything else, because she shot herself.
Pamela, called Woman by everybody, including her mother, is the hardest sister to get a handle on. She wrote far fewer letters than the others, and those she did were apparently largely filled with detailed accounts of the meals she'd cooked or eaten, so even fewer of them appear in this collection. She apparently suffered from polio in childhood, which affected her intellectual growth, enough to be noticible in this very quick family, and she was the most teased of them, especially by Nancy. But they agreed that she liked to be ragged on, enjoyed the attention, and certainly she always seemed to take it in stride. They definitely took delight in her eccentricities, and related stories to each other of "Woman's sagas", and Woman's conquests and social arrangements. They used the word "wondair" for her more than for anything else, and it didn't exactly mean wonderful but it did, too, wondering and fond and amused and perhaps a little appalled. She doesn't seem to have been shy or retiring - the stories her sisters relate to each other about her are always full of her browbeating somebody or other into arranging things to her benefit, or matter-of-factly ignoring important people - but she almost never waded into the family conflicts. She was quite self-sacrificing - she was the one who took on the care of Diana's children when Diana was in prison, and she cared for Nancy for long stretches while she was dying slowly of cancer - but she doesn't seem to have romanticised or derived any enjoyment from martyred devotion to others in the way that Diana, for example, sometimes did. (And she wasn't good at taking care of Diana's children; she was terribly unmaternal.) Really she seems to have just wanted to be able to tramp around doing her own thing.
Nancy's most complicated relationship was with Diana, whom she was always a little jealous of - for her beauty and popularity and children (which Nancy couldn't have) and for being loved. She actually denounced Diana to the government as a dangerous personage, when approached about it, before Diana's incarceration (which Diana didn't know till after Nancy's death). She was also closest to Diana, though; at one point they both lived for an extended time in Paris, and they spoke on the phone every morning and spent large portions of their time together. She had a freer and easier relationship with Jessica, once Jessica mellowed enough to not write Nancy off entirely as a de Gaulle supporter, than any of the others did. Partly because they saw eye to eye on their upbringing (desperately unfair they hadn't got a proper school education) and the shortcomings of their mother (vehemently denied by their other sisters), and partly because, I think, both of them were thicker skinned than the others, and the stakes in their relationship weren't so high as Nancy's with Diana, or Decca's with Debo and Unity, and there was no need for eggshell-walking around each other. And it was also partly because Nancy rather enjoyed it when Jessica stirred up conflict, I think, because Nancy's sense of humour swung that way. But her relationship with Debo was the one that was the most charming to read in letters. She addressed Debo as "9" (her mental age according to Nancy), and Debo addressed her as "Get on". Deborah was witty enough to be a worthy opponent for Nancy's wit, keenly appreciative of the ridiculous and ironically self-aware enough not to get hurt, but also sweet-nature enough that their exchanges could never turn mean, despite Nancy being Nancy.
Deborah and Diana had the closest relationship for the longest time - decades long. They agreed on all important matters, although whenever you read a letter in which Diana brings up politics or fascism or Hitler, Deborah entirely ignores it in her response. Diana and Unity, on the other hand, had the closest relationship when it made the most difference. They were the only two who could share their ardent devotion to Hitler and fascism, and they wrote and wrote to each other in those couple of years leading up to WWII, long letters full of painstakingly detailed accounts and encounters, and overflowing with ardent declarations.
Diana and Jessica are estranged from the moment they each discover politics, and there are little hurty references to how much Jessica had loved Diana but considers her the enemy now, and how much baby Decca and Debo had been Diana's absorbing interest and joy when she was a girl herself.
But it's Debo and Decca's relationship that is the most heartbreaking. As children they were the two youngest, and they had an invented language called Honnish, whose terms creep into the adult vocabulary of all the Mitfords. Deborah was devastated when Jessica ran away without saying anything, leaving her desperately lonely and increasingly unhappy, living with her parents and then with her mother and brain-damaged sister (Unity after the suicide attempt). Her letters to Jessica are full of brave cheer and pleas for her closest sister to write back. Jessica, meanwhile, was full to the brim of her new life and her new cause and her new love, with more to do than any day could hold, and her letters in the period after her elopement are brief and rather careless. They don't meet again for years, gradually growing further and further apart as Debo develops her own life and absorbing interests and Jessica's own interests pull further and further from her sisters'. When they finally do - Deborah goes to visit her, despite lukewarm encouragement from Jessica, who seems to have been deeply conflicted at the time about her sisters in general and her peeress sister coming to look at her life in particular - it's even more discouraging to read. Deborah is crushed by the changes in Jessica, the brashness and the aggressive speechifying, and they have almost nothing to talk to each other about. Later things get better, Decca mellows and Debo gets over some of her disillusioned little-sister worship, and they have several visits where they're good friends. But Deborah continues to nurse the memory of Jessica's abandonment as the worst moment of her life, which Jessica never seems to have been able to understand or believe - at one point they have a heart-to-heart conversation about it, blowing Jessica's mind, and she writes later that she thinks Debo must be misremembering: that they were close but not that close, despite their shared language, and it was more Decca and Unity who were inseparable, at that stage. (Jessica represents this even more strongly in her memoir Hons and Rebels, which is full to the brim with her difficult and heartbreaking love for Unity but barely mentions a relationship with Debo at all.)
Jessica and Unity's relationship is remarkable. Diana, the idealised older sister, Jessica repudiated forever for her fascism. But Unity, the next youngest after Jessica, with whom Jessica also had a made-up language (Bowdledidge), she continued to write to and profess her love for as long as they were both alive. Their violently conflicting politics shook them, definitely, and there's one exchange of letters which I can't find to quote, but in which they agree that if they ever meet on the field of conflict, they will of course have to kill each other. But they seem to have been able to carve out this space of love and respect that was separate to that.
There are all these other thoughts this book made me have, but we are already well past the point where this review is actually serving a useful purpose for people who aren't me, and I'm pretty sure nobody is reading by this point anyway. So I'll just say I AM SO IN LOVE WITH THIS BOOK. There.
January 26, 2012
I loved this book.
I know I have previously been guilty of romanticising the Mitford sisters (like an interviewer says to Diana, "It must have been really something when you were all together..."). In my mind they exist mainly in the 1930s, becoming beautiful young debutantes and making friends with the interesting and important people of the era. This is ridiculous, of course.
There is no better way to be cured of Midnight-in-Paris syndrome than by reading these fantastic letters. Learning the sisters' in-jokes, their delights and fears and irritations, following them all through the decades following the 30s and seeing where life took them, all these things contribute to a deeper understanding of the Mitford sisters, and of people in general. The intimacy of the medium allows the reader a sense of bypassing all the historiography, all the biases and prejudices of the writers of the time and after it. Here we find the actual women of the Mitford myth, what they thought of each other and of the legend that inexplicably sprung up around them.
I was so affected by reading these letters that I think it will be a long time before I tackle one of the several Mitford biographies that are currently weighing down my shelves. It would be like reading a biography of a close friend: you would be constantly shaking your head at the distortion of events and character.
As to the construction of the book, Charlotte Mosley's editing is almost perfect. The letters flow smoothly, with perhaps one or two large time lapses that make the reader wonder why no letters from a whole year made the cut. At first I read all the footnotes, but I found that the narratives of letters made more sense if I didn't do this religiously, occasionally flipping pages to figure out what they were talking about, but mostly just letting the feel of each letter do the talking (much like they tell a new reader to read the words around an unknown word to see if they can figure out its meaning). The research is clearly exhaustive but never overtakes the letters themselves. Mosley's introductions to each section are informative but again, don't detract from the stars of the show. She edited with such a loving and light touch that the book flies past.
I honestly thought reading a book of letters would be like reading a reference book, but I couldn't put this down! Sweet, poignant, sad, fascinating and joyous, the lives of the Mitford sisters were made infinitely richer by having each other to write to, and we are privileged to have access to their entire lives in this epic volume.
April 1, 2011
This one took awhile not really because of length but because it was too big to really carry around. Now I am finished! HUZZAH etc.
Primary sources are generally very interesting as long as you are interested in the subject matter and time period. I was interested in both, and so liked it very much.
When I started reading, the balance of the book seemed odd and off-kilter. Much of the Mitfords' fame/notoriety came right around the WWII era, so why was there such a large proportion of letters left after 1950? Well, it became apparent as I read that I just have not lived long enough yet to get a good handle on the potential scope of a lifetime.
Other than that:
- The stories were pretty awesome, and became more so cumulatively. Besides the actual personal history--which is very compelling--we get not just gossip/etc about Hitler and the various Nazi officials, but also about people like Prince Charles and Stephen Fry (who apparently looked up Debo Mitford when trying to get a handle on characterization for Vile Bodies!) AWESOME.
- Nicknames. It's like trying to decipher a secret language, and an entirely different one than Boudledidge (the younger Mitfords' actual invented secret language). They came up with some truly excellent names. Example: Queen Elizabeth is "Cake." Again, AWESOME.
In short, it's definitely worth a read if you're interested in 1. British social history ca 1930-2000, 2. the Mitford family or any one Mitford, and/or 3. puzzling through bits and pieces of insider info so as to get at the real story of a certain person, time, or story.
Primary sources are generally very interesting as long as you are interested in the subject matter and time period. I was interested in both, and so liked it very much.
When I started reading, the balance of the book seemed odd and off-kilter. Much of the Mitfords' fame/notoriety came right around the WWII era, so why was there such a large proportion of letters left after 1950? Well, it became apparent as I read that I just have not lived long enough yet to get a good handle on the potential scope of a lifetime.
Other than that:
- The stories were pretty awesome, and became more so cumulatively. Besides the actual personal history--which is very compelling--we get not just gossip/etc about Hitler and the various Nazi officials, but also about people like Prince Charles and Stephen Fry (who apparently looked up Debo Mitford when trying to get a handle on characterization for Vile Bodies!) AWESOME.
- Nicknames. It's like trying to decipher a secret language, and an entirely different one than Boudledidge (the younger Mitfords' actual invented secret language). They came up with some truly excellent names. Example: Queen Elizabeth is "Cake." Again, AWESOME.
In short, it's definitely worth a read if you're interested in 1. British social history ca 1930-2000, 2. the Mitford family or any one Mitford, and/or 3. puzzling through bits and pieces of insider info so as to get at the real story of a certain person, time, or story.
June 17, 2008
Fascinating collection of letters exchanged between the six Mitford sisters over the course of their lives. The correspondence spans decades for sisters who led quite extraordinary lives.
The correspondence includes exchanges from Nancy Mitford, the eldest, who became a best-selling author, from Unity who became a Nazi who met Hitler several times in the 1930s and plainly hero-worshipped him in her correspondence, from Diana who first married the heir to the Guinness fortune and divorced him to marry a leading Fascist in England in the 1930s, from Jessica, who became a Communist and eloped with a member of the Churchill family and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War before ultimately settling in the US, from Pamela, who became a "farmer" and after a first marriage moved to Switzerland with a woman whom she had a long term relationship with,and from youngest Deborah who ultimately became the Duchess of Devonshire, and is the sole surviving sister.
The collection is edited by Diana's daughter-in-law. She managed to assemble an amazing collection of correspondence between the sisters. I thought she was remarkably neutral when it came to the political views and activity of Unity and Diana. I did not think she took the same neutral approach when it came to others of the sisters. I thought this was unfortunate.
The correspondence includes exchanges from Nancy Mitford, the eldest, who became a best-selling author, from Unity who became a Nazi who met Hitler several times in the 1930s and plainly hero-worshipped him in her correspondence, from Diana who first married the heir to the Guinness fortune and divorced him to marry a leading Fascist in England in the 1930s, from Jessica, who became a Communist and eloped with a member of the Churchill family and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War before ultimately settling in the US, from Pamela, who became a "farmer" and after a first marriage moved to Switzerland with a woman whom she had a long term relationship with,and from youngest Deborah who ultimately became the Duchess of Devonshire, and is the sole surviving sister.
The collection is edited by Diana's daughter-in-law. She managed to assemble an amazing collection of correspondence between the sisters. I thought she was remarkably neutral when it came to the political views and activity of Unity and Diana. I did not think she took the same neutral approach when it came to others of the sisters. I thought this was unfortunate.
Want to read
October 10, 2014Sorry but this just wasn't what I was expecting. I think I need a lot more background on this family to enjoy it. By page 67 I decided I wasn't interested in a family where at least one sister is a devotee of hitler and comments, poor Fuhrer this and poor Fuhrer that.
August 1, 2018
'I also think a volume of letters will have to wait until everyone's dead, don't you, because of hurt feelings?' Diana to Deborah, 17 August 1980.
Such was this potential 834 page can of worms, comprising just an estimated five per cent of the sisters' letters, yet effectively telling six interrelated life stories: the daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale and his wife Sydney Bowles (Sydney's father founded English Vanity Fair and The Lady magazines, employing son-in-law David to manage The Lady).
The Mitford saga lends credence to the adage 'truth is stranger than fiction'. You couldn't invent such tales. Hardly a week went by in the 1930s without one of this sextet making headlines.
The opening letters, from 24 July 1925, show the interwar halcyon years, the English country lives of the Mitford girls. Mainly home-educated by governesses, most are well read thanks to their grandfather Algernon Freeman-Mitford's legacy which included a stately family library.
Debutante of 1922 and Bright Young Thing Nancy is 20, flitting to and from her London and Oxford social scenes. Pamela is 17, Diana 15, Unity 10 and Jessica 7. Little Deborah is just 2, her first letters not appearing here until she approaches her tenth birthday in 1930.
To subsidise her father's tight allowance, Nancy starts writing, encouraged by literary amigo Evelyn Waugh. Initially uncredited in society gossip columns, she then sells signed articles, until in 1930 The Lady gives her a regular column (presumably helped by family connections). She soon attempts novels, basing characters on relatives, friends and acquaintances.
If Nancy's literary enterprise is a gamble, her love life is a fiasco. She is soon ditched after a futile lengthy engagement to effeminate gay aesthete Hamish St Clair Erskine, four years her junior, second son of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn and ex-lover of her brother Tom. On the rebound, she is engaged to erratic Peter Rodd, second son of Sir Rennell Rodd the soon-to-be ennobled Baron Rennell. The marriage will become largely a sham.
But Nancy's exploits are eclipsed by the younger Diana, who in 1929 wins over her naysaying parents and marries brewing heir Bryan Guinness who will inherit the barony of Moyne. Such a great society beauty is she that family friend James Lees-Milne calls her 'the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen'. Evelyn Waugh dedicates his novel Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to Diana and Bryan. Her portrait gets painted by Augustus John, Pavel Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb.
Diana triggers scandal in 1932 by leaving her husband for British Union of Fascists (BUF) head Sir Oswald Mosley. As Mosley does not intend leaving his wife 'Cimmie' (Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India) Diana lives in a flat as his mistress, until in 1933 Cimmie dies of peritonitis.
With Unity along for the ride, Diana then ingratiates herself with Adolph Hitler's circle on Mosley's covert bidding for a commercial radio station on German soil to fund Mosley's BUF. In 1936 Diana and Mosley secretly marry in Joseph Goebbels' Berlin house, with Hitler a guest. Unity is meanwhile swept away, a Hitler devotee and Third Reich fanatic, basing herself in Germany much of the time.
In 1937 teenage Jessica, the 'red sheep' of the family, having long saved to run away, elopes to Spain with second cousin Esmond Romilly, Communist nephew of Winston S Churchill. Romilly finds work reporting for the News Chronicle and, after legal obstacles caused by their parents' opposition, they marry and move to London, in the poor industrial East End.
On 20 December 1937 Jessica has a baby, Julia, who dies the following May in a measles epidemic. In 1939 Jessica and Esmond emigrate to the USA. When WWII starts Esmond enlists in the Royal Canadian Air Force, leaving Jessica in Washington D.C. carrying another daughter, Constancia. After a bombing raid over Germany, Esmond goes missing in action on 30 November 1941.
Nancy meanwhile discovers in the summer of 1938 she is pregnant, but miscarries. In early 1939 she joins her husband Peter Rodd in the South of France as a relief worker, assisting Spanish refugees fleeing Franco's armies in the civil war. Soon afterwards Rodd, commissioned into the Welsh Guards, departs overseas and Nancy, back in London, has her second miscarriage.
The early war years are gruelling for all, except maybe Pamela who always took life in her stride. She has married the brilliant 'rampantly bisexual' scientist and heir to the News of the World Derek Jackson (becoming the second of Jackson's six wives). From around now too, relations between Jessica and Diana permanently freeze, their political rift so deep it becomes personal.
On 29 June 1940 Diana, prised from eleven week old Max Mosley, is interned without charge in Holloway Prison under Defence Regulation 18b, a dangerous person to the state, tagged 'England's most hated woman'. With Mosley already interned separately in Brixton Prison, Diana pines for her husband and four sons (two from each marriage). The couple reunite in Holloway in December 1941, lodged in a flat on prison grounds, thanks to Mitford cousin-in-law Prime Minister Winston S Churchill. Both are released in November 1943, on grounds of Mosley's ill health, and placed under house arrest until war's end at Mosley's Crux Easton property in Berkshire.
Nancy's first four published novels, satirical farces, have seen no great acclaim. Her husband fights overseas. She does war work in London's blitz, first as an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) driver. Then at a Paddington casualty depot, writing with indelible pencil on the foreheads of the dead and dying. Then in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk. Also helping refugees billeted at her parents' London house in Rutland Gate, requisitioned to accommodate Polish Jews evacuated from Whitechapel. An affair with Free French officer André Roy results in a third pregnancy. Nancy again miscarries, with complications leading to a hysterectomy in November 1941. Convalescing, at a loose end she works as an assistant at Heywood Hill's Mayfair bookshop and literati hangout, becoming the shop's social nucleus.
Unable to reconcile with war, Unity publicly shoots herself in the head at Munich's Englischer Garten. She survives with bullet lodged in brain. Hospitalised unconscious in Munich for weeks with Hitler suppressing news coverage, she is 'missing' to her family in England. After two months her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale hear from a clinic in neutral Switzerland, where Hitler has had her sent. Transporting Unity home by ambulance, Lady Redesdale becomes her carer. Permanently impaired with a mental age of twelve, Unity is volatile and incontinent. This compounds the stress on the Redesdales' marriage, caused by political differences. They permanently separate.
Deborah at first helps with Unity, then after marrying in 1941 roams England following in-training Cold Stream Guards husband Andrew Cavendish, second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. By war's end she has lost two babies, her only brother Tom, four best friends and two brothers-in-law. Her husband has unexpectedly become heir to his father's dukedom.
The post war years I found the most gripping. Unity dies aged 33 from her lingering gunshot wound. Nancy enjoys a literary breakthrough with The Pursuit of Love, gives up on her unhappy marriage and moves to Paris to be near new love of her life, Charles de Gaulle's right hand man Gaston Palewski. Bedecking herself in haute couture she becomes an ardent Francophile, nicknamed by her sisters the 'French Lady Writer'.
Diana and Mosley, social pariahs through their politics, move to France near to Nancy, becoming friends and neighbours of fellow pariahs the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the abdicated King Edward VIII and twice divorced Wallis Simpson, whom he has married).
The 1950s are for me the centrepiece of this epic, with the sisters at their peaks. Nancy's writing career soars while her adoration of Palewski is never fully reciprocated, their coupling never formalised. His diplomatic career and other romances leave Nancy in the shadows, over years their relationship trickling to naught. Nancy's acerbic wit, irresistibly funny, shields a tortured woman. Unrequited love, loneliness and sisterly jealousy are thought her underlying issues. She also reveals having felt unloved by her mother (a complaint shared by none of her sisters).
Deborah has become Duchess of Devonshire, soon-to-be hostess of royalty and world leaders (she is also related to the Kennedy's by marriage). She administers historic Chatsworth House, her husband's 35,000-acre family seat which was institutionalised for WWII. Planning to move in, she oversees its colossal restoration. She is also Châtelaine of Bolton Abbey estate in Yorkshire and the Lismore Castle estate in Ireland. She involves herself in local charities and functions, supervises staff, shares her husband's interest in thoroughbred racehorses and breeds Shetland ponies.
Jessica, war-widowed and remarried, could not be more different. Renouncing her gentrified roots, she is a naturalised American and Communist Party USA member, living in Oakland, California. In her 10 November 1951 letter to Deborah, who contemplates visiting, Jessica writes: 'We lead an extremely non-duchessy life here. For instance, if you want to stay with us you would have to sleep on a couch in the dining room, we don't have a spare room here ...' Jessica becomes an American civil rights figure and bestselling author as celebrated as Nancy. The older of her two little boys, Nicholas, is killed in 1955 when hit by a bus. She never speaks of it. Mellowing, she resigns from the Communist Party in 1958.
Pamela, teased fondly by her sisters who nickname her 'Woman', shuns world affairs and keeps to country life. This is reflected in Poet Laureate John Betjeman's unpublished poem The Mitford Girls, ending with a line about his favourite: 'Miss Pamela, most rural of them all'. Living variously in England, Ireland and Switzerland, she is the least active correspondent (perhaps mildly dyslexic, notes the editor), yet deliciously dotty. Divorced with huge settlement, she sets up home with an Italian horsewoman, her life companion. Never remarrying, she is thought to have become 'a you-know-what-bian' as Jessica writes to her husband in 1955 when first visiting Europe with her American family.
The sisters' frail old father Lord Redesdale dies in 1958. His estranged wife, their mother, soon follows. As the seasons turn we witness the inevitable peaks and troughs, stumbling across some heartrending tragedy, fabulous triumph or side-splitting gem.
Take for instance Nancy's shriek-worthy nickname 'Pygmy-Peep-a-toes' for five-foot two-inch Princess Margaret, who is constantly in the headlines over her affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend and whose open-toed shoes Nancy thinks vulgar.
Or Deborah's nickname 'Cake' for the Queen Mother, given after a wedding where, on hearing the bride and groom are about to cut the cake, QM exclaims 'Oh, the cake!' as if having never seen it happen before.
Their drollery and regal 'Mitfordese' drawl recurs throughout ('Do admit!' 'Do tell!' 'Please picture!')
As the 1960s and '70s unfold we see the sisters age and face social revolution, while old grievances to one another fester. These include: whether Jessica's memoir Hons and Rebels invents episodes of their growing up years to match Nancy's fictionalised versions in The Pursuit of Love; whether their brother Tom, killed in WWII, was a Communist supporter, Nazi sympathiser or neither; and Nancy's spitefulness.
Diana, Deborah and Jessica become grandmother's (one of Jessica's two African American grandsons will later become legal scholar and Professor of Law at Yale James Forman Jr.).
In 1972 Nancy, in poor health, is made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She is soon diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, dying on 30 June 1973 at home in France and cremated, her ashes buried in England alongside sister Unity.
We now witness the remaining sisters forwarding each others' letters when ganging up against each other beneath the smiling repartee. Later ones, after Nancy's agonising death, betray simmering resentments towards her and Jessica, the two who forged independent careers rather than leaning on marriage for wealth.
This backstabbing of the self-made two is by the most privileged two, Diana and Deborah, though Deborah is more Diana's sounding board for the most part. As the only sister to remain consistently on speaking terms with all the others, Deborah is the natural mediator, though this becomes harder as her husband battles alcoholism.
As they further mature we see their growth, especially of Diana (once 'England's most hated woman'), essentially so kind yet understandably tortured in rare moments. In exile with Mosley she has time to ponder, more so after his 1980 death. She suffers from deafness. She writes prolifically, memoirs, biographies, book reviews, translations and commentaries on her heyday, ever remorseless of her pre-war connexions. In A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography she reiterates, 'I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston [Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting.'
Only years after Nancy's death will Diana learn from released classified files of Nancy's treacherous role in her wartime internment. Nancy had 'informed' British Intelligence agency MI5 that Diana was 'a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and admirer of Hitler [who] sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy in general.' She had later made official behind-scenes noises to prevent Diana's release. Though Jessica had also (from America) lobbied against Diana and Mosley's release, she had not later feigned amity, unlike neighbourly Nancy whom Diana had devotedly supported through her protracted terminal illness.
Towards the close of the 20th century two more sisters leave us. Pamela, hospitalised after a fall, dies in London on 12 April 1994. Jessica dies in the USA of lung cancer, aged 78, on 22 July 1996, her ashes scattered at sea. She is survived by her widower and two of her four children. Her deep rift with Diana is never healed, their only brief contact having been while politely visiting the dying Nancy.
The voices taper down to Diana and Deborah, the only two left in the new millennium. The last published letter, from Deborah to Diana, is dated 5 January 2002. When Diana dies in Paris in 2003, leaving no sisters for Deborah to exchange letters with, there's a poignancy finishing this enormous book.
Diana was described in a Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003) editorial, after her death, as an 'unrepentant Nazi and effortlessly charming.' According to her Daily Telegraph obituary, a diamond swastika was among her jewels.
She was survived by four sons: author Desmond Guinness; Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne; Alexander and Max Mosley. Her stepson, novelist Nicholas Mosley, wrote a critical memoir of his father for which Diana never forgave him. Two of Diana's grandchildren, Daphne and Tom Guinness, and her great-granddaughter Jasmine Guinness, became models.
Deborah lived eleven more years, producing published works from memoir to gardening to cookbooks, a whole series on Chatsworth House. Made a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) for her service to the Royal Collection Trust, she died widowed on 24 September 2014, aged 94. Her funeral was attended by family and friends, six hundred staff, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. She is survived by three of seven children, eight grandchildren (including model Stella Tennant) and eighteen great-grandchildren.
We cannot pity this youngest, longest living and most advantaged sister, who had such a good innings, yet she comes off as the stalwart figure of the piece and enormously likeable.
Charlotte Mosley's masterful editing and footnoting is a work of art, her generous chapter introductions setting the scene for each period. There's an indispensable index of nicknames, of which the Mitfords had so many, plus a helpful family tree and scholarly rear index.
One must concur with J.K. Rowling's comment on the front cover: 'The story of the Mitford sisters has never been told as well as they tell it themselves.'
This is the ultimate Mitford fan ride.
Such was this potential 834 page can of worms, comprising just an estimated five per cent of the sisters' letters, yet effectively telling six interrelated life stories: the daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale and his wife Sydney Bowles (Sydney's father founded English Vanity Fair and The Lady magazines, employing son-in-law David to manage The Lady).
The Mitford saga lends credence to the adage 'truth is stranger than fiction'. You couldn't invent such tales. Hardly a week went by in the 1930s without one of this sextet making headlines.
The opening letters, from 24 July 1925, show the interwar halcyon years, the English country lives of the Mitford girls. Mainly home-educated by governesses, most are well read thanks to their grandfather Algernon Freeman-Mitford's legacy which included a stately family library.
Debutante of 1922 and Bright Young Thing Nancy is 20, flitting to and from her London and Oxford social scenes. Pamela is 17, Diana 15, Unity 10 and Jessica 7. Little Deborah is just 2, her first letters not appearing here until she approaches her tenth birthday in 1930.
To subsidise her father's tight allowance, Nancy starts writing, encouraged by literary amigo Evelyn Waugh. Initially uncredited in society gossip columns, she then sells signed articles, until in 1930 The Lady gives her a regular column (presumably helped by family connections). She soon attempts novels, basing characters on relatives, friends and acquaintances.
If Nancy's literary enterprise is a gamble, her love life is a fiasco. She is soon ditched after a futile lengthy engagement to effeminate gay aesthete Hamish St Clair Erskine, four years her junior, second son of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn and ex-lover of her brother Tom. On the rebound, she is engaged to erratic Peter Rodd, second son of Sir Rennell Rodd the soon-to-be ennobled Baron Rennell. The marriage will become largely a sham.
But Nancy's exploits are eclipsed by the younger Diana, who in 1929 wins over her naysaying parents and marries brewing heir Bryan Guinness who will inherit the barony of Moyne. Such a great society beauty is she that family friend James Lees-Milne calls her 'the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen'. Evelyn Waugh dedicates his novel Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to Diana and Bryan. Her portrait gets painted by Augustus John, Pavel Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb.
Diana triggers scandal in 1932 by leaving her husband for British Union of Fascists (BUF) head Sir Oswald Mosley. As Mosley does not intend leaving his wife 'Cimmie' (Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India) Diana lives in a flat as his mistress, until in 1933 Cimmie dies of peritonitis.
With Unity along for the ride, Diana then ingratiates herself with Adolph Hitler's circle on Mosley's covert bidding for a commercial radio station on German soil to fund Mosley's BUF. In 1936 Diana and Mosley secretly marry in Joseph Goebbels' Berlin house, with Hitler a guest. Unity is meanwhile swept away, a Hitler devotee and Third Reich fanatic, basing herself in Germany much of the time.
In 1937 teenage Jessica, the 'red sheep' of the family, having long saved to run away, elopes to Spain with second cousin Esmond Romilly, Communist nephew of Winston S Churchill. Romilly finds work reporting for the News Chronicle and, after legal obstacles caused by their parents' opposition, they marry and move to London, in the poor industrial East End.
On 20 December 1937 Jessica has a baby, Julia, who dies the following May in a measles epidemic. In 1939 Jessica and Esmond emigrate to the USA. When WWII starts Esmond enlists in the Royal Canadian Air Force, leaving Jessica in Washington D.C. carrying another daughter, Constancia. After a bombing raid over Germany, Esmond goes missing in action on 30 November 1941.
Nancy meanwhile discovers in the summer of 1938 she is pregnant, but miscarries. In early 1939 she joins her husband Peter Rodd in the South of France as a relief worker, assisting Spanish refugees fleeing Franco's armies in the civil war. Soon afterwards Rodd, commissioned into the Welsh Guards, departs overseas and Nancy, back in London, has her second miscarriage.
The early war years are gruelling for all, except maybe Pamela who always took life in her stride. She has married the brilliant 'rampantly bisexual' scientist and heir to the News of the World Derek Jackson (becoming the second of Jackson's six wives). From around now too, relations between Jessica and Diana permanently freeze, their political rift so deep it becomes personal.
On 29 June 1940 Diana, prised from eleven week old Max Mosley, is interned without charge in Holloway Prison under Defence Regulation 18b, a dangerous person to the state, tagged 'England's most hated woman'. With Mosley already interned separately in Brixton Prison, Diana pines for her husband and four sons (two from each marriage). The couple reunite in Holloway in December 1941, lodged in a flat on prison grounds, thanks to Mitford cousin-in-law Prime Minister Winston S Churchill. Both are released in November 1943, on grounds of Mosley's ill health, and placed under house arrest until war's end at Mosley's Crux Easton property in Berkshire.
Nancy's first four published novels, satirical farces, have seen no great acclaim. Her husband fights overseas. She does war work in London's blitz, first as an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) driver. Then at a Paddington casualty depot, writing with indelible pencil on the foreheads of the dead and dying. Then in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk. Also helping refugees billeted at her parents' London house in Rutland Gate, requisitioned to accommodate Polish Jews evacuated from Whitechapel. An affair with Free French officer André Roy results in a third pregnancy. Nancy again miscarries, with complications leading to a hysterectomy in November 1941. Convalescing, at a loose end she works as an assistant at Heywood Hill's Mayfair bookshop and literati hangout, becoming the shop's social nucleus.
Unable to reconcile with war, Unity publicly shoots herself in the head at Munich's Englischer Garten. She survives with bullet lodged in brain. Hospitalised unconscious in Munich for weeks with Hitler suppressing news coverage, she is 'missing' to her family in England. After two months her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale hear from a clinic in neutral Switzerland, where Hitler has had her sent. Transporting Unity home by ambulance, Lady Redesdale becomes her carer. Permanently impaired with a mental age of twelve, Unity is volatile and incontinent. This compounds the stress on the Redesdales' marriage, caused by political differences. They permanently separate.
Deborah at first helps with Unity, then after marrying in 1941 roams England following in-training Cold Stream Guards husband Andrew Cavendish, second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. By war's end she has lost two babies, her only brother Tom, four best friends and two brothers-in-law. Her husband has unexpectedly become heir to his father's dukedom.
The post war years I found the most gripping. Unity dies aged 33 from her lingering gunshot wound. Nancy enjoys a literary breakthrough with The Pursuit of Love, gives up on her unhappy marriage and moves to Paris to be near new love of her life, Charles de Gaulle's right hand man Gaston Palewski. Bedecking herself in haute couture she becomes an ardent Francophile, nicknamed by her sisters the 'French Lady Writer'.
Diana and Mosley, social pariahs through their politics, move to France near to Nancy, becoming friends and neighbours of fellow pariahs the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the abdicated King Edward VIII and twice divorced Wallis Simpson, whom he has married).
The 1950s are for me the centrepiece of this epic, with the sisters at their peaks. Nancy's writing career soars while her adoration of Palewski is never fully reciprocated, their coupling never formalised. His diplomatic career and other romances leave Nancy in the shadows, over years their relationship trickling to naught. Nancy's acerbic wit, irresistibly funny, shields a tortured woman. Unrequited love, loneliness and sisterly jealousy are thought her underlying issues. She also reveals having felt unloved by her mother (a complaint shared by none of her sisters).
Deborah has become Duchess of Devonshire, soon-to-be hostess of royalty and world leaders (she is also related to the Kennedy's by marriage). She administers historic Chatsworth House, her husband's 35,000-acre family seat which was institutionalised for WWII. Planning to move in, she oversees its colossal restoration. She is also Châtelaine of Bolton Abbey estate in Yorkshire and the Lismore Castle estate in Ireland. She involves herself in local charities and functions, supervises staff, shares her husband's interest in thoroughbred racehorses and breeds Shetland ponies.
Jessica, war-widowed and remarried, could not be more different. Renouncing her gentrified roots, she is a naturalised American and Communist Party USA member, living in Oakland, California. In her 10 November 1951 letter to Deborah, who contemplates visiting, Jessica writes: 'We lead an extremely non-duchessy life here. For instance, if you want to stay with us you would have to sleep on a couch in the dining room, we don't have a spare room here ...' Jessica becomes an American civil rights figure and bestselling author as celebrated as Nancy. The older of her two little boys, Nicholas, is killed in 1955 when hit by a bus. She never speaks of it. Mellowing, she resigns from the Communist Party in 1958.
Pamela, teased fondly by her sisters who nickname her 'Woman', shuns world affairs and keeps to country life. This is reflected in Poet Laureate John Betjeman's unpublished poem The Mitford Girls, ending with a line about his favourite: 'Miss Pamela, most rural of them all'. Living variously in England, Ireland and Switzerland, she is the least active correspondent (perhaps mildly dyslexic, notes the editor), yet deliciously dotty. Divorced with huge settlement, she sets up home with an Italian horsewoman, her life companion. Never remarrying, she is thought to have become 'a you-know-what-bian' as Jessica writes to her husband in 1955 when first visiting Europe with her American family.
The sisters' frail old father Lord Redesdale dies in 1958. His estranged wife, their mother, soon follows. As the seasons turn we witness the inevitable peaks and troughs, stumbling across some heartrending tragedy, fabulous triumph or side-splitting gem.
Take for instance Nancy's shriek-worthy nickname 'Pygmy-Peep-a-toes' for five-foot two-inch Princess Margaret, who is constantly in the headlines over her affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend and whose open-toed shoes Nancy thinks vulgar.
Or Deborah's nickname 'Cake' for the Queen Mother, given after a wedding where, on hearing the bride and groom are about to cut the cake, QM exclaims 'Oh, the cake!' as if having never seen it happen before.
Their drollery and regal 'Mitfordese' drawl recurs throughout ('Do admit!' 'Do tell!' 'Please picture!')
As the 1960s and '70s unfold we see the sisters age and face social revolution, while old grievances to one another fester. These include: whether Jessica's memoir Hons and Rebels invents episodes of their growing up years to match Nancy's fictionalised versions in The Pursuit of Love; whether their brother Tom, killed in WWII, was a Communist supporter, Nazi sympathiser or neither; and Nancy's spitefulness.
Diana, Deborah and Jessica become grandmother's (one of Jessica's two African American grandsons will later become legal scholar and Professor of Law at Yale James Forman Jr.).
In 1972 Nancy, in poor health, is made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She is soon diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, dying on 30 June 1973 at home in France and cremated, her ashes buried in England alongside sister Unity.
We now witness the remaining sisters forwarding each others' letters when ganging up against each other beneath the smiling repartee. Later ones, after Nancy's agonising death, betray simmering resentments towards her and Jessica, the two who forged independent careers rather than leaning on marriage for wealth.
This backstabbing of the self-made two is by the most privileged two, Diana and Deborah, though Deborah is more Diana's sounding board for the most part. As the only sister to remain consistently on speaking terms with all the others, Deborah is the natural mediator, though this becomes harder as her husband battles alcoholism.
As they further mature we see their growth, especially of Diana (once 'England's most hated woman'), essentially so kind yet understandably tortured in rare moments. In exile with Mosley she has time to ponder, more so after his 1980 death. She suffers from deafness. She writes prolifically, memoirs, biographies, book reviews, translations and commentaries on her heyday, ever remorseless of her pre-war connexions. In A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography she reiterates, 'I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston [Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting.'
Only years after Nancy's death will Diana learn from released classified files of Nancy's treacherous role in her wartime internment. Nancy had 'informed' British Intelligence agency MI5 that Diana was 'a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and admirer of Hitler [who] sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy in general.' She had later made official behind-scenes noises to prevent Diana's release. Though Jessica had also (from America) lobbied against Diana and Mosley's release, she had not later feigned amity, unlike neighbourly Nancy whom Diana had devotedly supported through her protracted terminal illness.
Towards the close of the 20th century two more sisters leave us. Pamela, hospitalised after a fall, dies in London on 12 April 1994. Jessica dies in the USA of lung cancer, aged 78, on 22 July 1996, her ashes scattered at sea. She is survived by her widower and two of her four children. Her deep rift with Diana is never healed, their only brief contact having been while politely visiting the dying Nancy.
The voices taper down to Diana and Deborah, the only two left in the new millennium. The last published letter, from Deborah to Diana, is dated 5 January 2002. When Diana dies in Paris in 2003, leaving no sisters for Deborah to exchange letters with, there's a poignancy finishing this enormous book.
Diana was described in a Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003) editorial, after her death, as an 'unrepentant Nazi and effortlessly charming.' According to her Daily Telegraph obituary, a diamond swastika was among her jewels.
She was survived by four sons: author Desmond Guinness; Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne; Alexander and Max Mosley. Her stepson, novelist Nicholas Mosley, wrote a critical memoir of his father for which Diana never forgave him. Two of Diana's grandchildren, Daphne and Tom Guinness, and her great-granddaughter Jasmine Guinness, became models.
Deborah lived eleven more years, producing published works from memoir to gardening to cookbooks, a whole series on Chatsworth House. Made a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) for her service to the Royal Collection Trust, she died widowed on 24 September 2014, aged 94. Her funeral was attended by family and friends, six hundred staff, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. She is survived by three of seven children, eight grandchildren (including model Stella Tennant) and eighteen great-grandchildren.
We cannot pity this youngest, longest living and most advantaged sister, who had such a good innings, yet she comes off as the stalwart figure of the piece and enormously likeable.
Charlotte Mosley's masterful editing and footnoting is a work of art, her generous chapter introductions setting the scene for each period. There's an indispensable index of nicknames, of which the Mitfords had so many, plus a helpful family tree and scholarly rear index.
One must concur with J.K. Rowling's comment on the front cover: 'The story of the Mitford sisters has never been told as well as they tell it themselves.'
This is the ultimate Mitford fan ride.
June 9, 2016
I'm really surprised that most of the reviews have ignored the politics of the Mitford sisters which permeate this book. The editor, herself a Mosley, has put little symbols alongside each letter to identify the writer: a moon for Diana, a plume for Nancy the writer, a coronet for Deborah, the current Duchess of Devonshire, the hammer and sickle for Jessica - and a swastika for Unity who made Hitler her idol.
The letters from the 1930s are filled with visits to Germany, having tea with Hitler (who is, apparently, "sweet"), Goebbels, Hess, Speer; with party conferences and Nazi parades in Munich. Unity tells in her letters of staunch Nazi SS men who are "just devastated" to find that their grandparents have Jewish blood and what a tragedy this is for them; and talks about an invitation to visit Dachau , the concentration camp, used at this stage for political prisoners.
I wasn't ignorant of the Mitford association with fascism but I have to say that I have found it very difficult to read the casual, unthinking way they accept Hitler as a hero and Nazism as the saviour of the world. So many other reviews have talked about the wit and humour of the letters but I am afraid that is drowned out for me. I am also aware, of course, that the Mitfords weren't alone in their allegiance to fascism and that it perhaps looks different with hindsight than at the time - perhaps.
I'm not for a moment advocating censorship and think the letters are a testament to the insidious glamorisation of an abhorrent creed - but if I'd known that there was such an uncomfortable element to the book I would probably have never started reading it in the first place. It's not just a case of political difference, I am quite happy to accept that others do not have to share my viewpoint, but I do think that Nazism is more than a political creed, it is -and has been found in international law courts - to be a crime against humanity. To therefore read the letters of a silly, thoughtless and unthinking girl heroising the Nazis and signing off "Heil Hitler" is not something that I am comfortable doing.
By all means read this book, but at least be aware that there is a very dark heart beneath the surface sparkle.
The letters from the 1930s are filled with visits to Germany, having tea with Hitler (who is, apparently, "sweet"), Goebbels, Hess, Speer; with party conferences and Nazi parades in Munich. Unity tells in her letters of staunch Nazi SS men who are "just devastated" to find that their grandparents have Jewish blood and what a tragedy this is for them; and talks about an invitation to visit Dachau , the concentration camp, used at this stage for political prisoners.
I wasn't ignorant of the Mitford association with fascism but I have to say that I have found it very difficult to read the casual, unthinking way they accept Hitler as a hero and Nazism as the saviour of the world. So many other reviews have talked about the wit and humour of the letters but I am afraid that is drowned out for me. I am also aware, of course, that the Mitfords weren't alone in their allegiance to fascism and that it perhaps looks different with hindsight than at the time - perhaps.
I'm not for a moment advocating censorship and think the letters are a testament to the insidious glamorisation of an abhorrent creed - but if I'd known that there was such an uncomfortable element to the book I would probably have never started reading it in the first place. It's not just a case of political difference, I am quite happy to accept that others do not have to share my viewpoint, but I do think that Nazism is more than a political creed, it is -and has been found in international law courts - to be a crime against humanity. To therefore read the letters of a silly, thoughtless and unthinking girl heroising the Nazis and signing off "Heil Hitler" is not something that I am comfortable doing.
By all means read this book, but at least be aware that there is a very dark heart beneath the surface sparkle.
October 23, 2019
We were asked to stay with somebody called Himmler or something, tickets and everything paid for...I suppose he read my book & longed for a good giggle with the witty authoress. Actually he wanted to show us over a concentration camp, now why? So that I could write a funny book about them. (Nancy, 1935)I must have been out of my head when I added this work to my TBR seven years ago, before even my originally planned college graduation (in Bioengineering, if you can believe it) or any significant amount of reading of/practice with the arduous sorts of nonfiction. I suppose I was still watching "Downton Abbey" then, as well as so otherwise desperately unhappy with my trajectory back then that I grasped at anything that was big and weighty and not obsessed with most everything I'd grow to despise (it was the same motivation that led me to get through group reads of both Brothers Karamazov and Ulysses while following along on Project Gutenberg editions of all things), As such, thank the gods I didn't feel like starting it til now, as it took 140 pages to catch onto the flow and another 450 to start truly appreciating the worth of witnessing (white affluent Anglo) history from such a unique viewpoint. The good news is, I'm in no danger of giving up on the other Mitford books I have on hand, as out of the six, I hit upon the two, Nancy and Jessica, who most suit my tastes in disparately agreeable fashions. Racism and fascism and classism galore, but I've spent enough time with this work to be able to name all of the faces on this edition's front cover, and that has to count for something.
Fascism is now such a notable feature of modern life all over the world that it must be possible to consider it in any context, when attempting to give a picture of life as it is lived today. (Nancy Mitford, 1935)
About Edmond's feelings for fascists (actually I prefer to be called a National Socialist as you know)...I hate the communists just as much as he hated Nazis, as you know...I naturally wouldn't hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary for my cause, and I should expect him to do the same to me. But in the meanwhile, as that isn't necessary, I don't see why we shouldn't be good friends, do you. (Unity, 1937)
Observing the Nuremberg trials, Winston Churchill commented to Lord Ismay, 'It shows that if you get into a war, it is supremely important to win it. You and I would be in a pretty pickle if we had lost.For most, family is either the best or the worst thing that ever happens to them. I can personally attest to both sides without reference to outside resources, but the Mitfords take the cake in passion, complacency, and pure stubbornness when it comes to their opinions, ideologies, and, every so often, their facts. It's a family of two black children and their Nazi/fascist aunts (one of whom even survives long enough to witness them growing up), of multiple well received authors and at least one who has soared to the ivory echelons of Anglo lit, of lies, betrayals, royalty, trans-Pacific elopements, and huge amount sof names, of which I relished the few I recognized, especially when it was of favored authors. Here I read gushings over and witnessed pictures of Hitler and co., and here I also received confirmation that both Dumas père and Pushkin were black and viewed pictures of Maya Angelou. I have added at least one work on inadvertent recommendation spawning from this personnel-turned public correspondence. It was also terribly boring at times, and the edition was one of those that may eventually convince me to start lifting weights, if only so that I have an easier time lugging tomes like these around. In short, this is definitely not the most progressive read under the sun, but through the perspectives of beauty, privilege, and, for the most part, extremely good connections and/or extreme wealth, this is a view of nearly the entirety of the 20th and a smidge of the 21st c. that is both sky high and pitifully narrow in a way I once found fascinating in an uncritical fashion, but these days find worth in for far more scientific reasons. In the back of my mind, I feel the need to read at least twenty more books either by or centered around the Mitfords to get some kind of grasp on their lives, but I've resisted such propulsion towards the straight and white of things for some time. All I can say is, after having gotten through this, I'm looking forward to Nancy's biographies and Jessica's memoirs more now than ever.
I also dined with some American friends & sat next a handsome & apparently powerful Mr Pulitzer. He said to me 'Why do the French resist any interference in N Africa?' I said 'Well how would you like it if we began to interfere with your lynching arrangements?' He roared, I must say. So the world wags on. (Nancy, 1955)
When American reviews are good they are better than any because unlike European reviewers they actually read the book. (Nancy, 1961)
...[T]he children really were brought up to that bigoted sort of liberalism...which naturally results in coffee babies & no wedding. (Deborah, 1967)I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who hadn't previously either demonstrated a great deal of interest and/or a great deal of stamina when it comes to reading what amounts to an enormous epistolary novel, albeit, all of it nonfiction. It takes a while to see the point of it for someone like me who grew out of her enamorment with upper class English women a long time ago, but it did give me an invaluable look at the normalization of Fascism/Nazism and the ways such persists to this very day, in addition to everything else that has managed to escape, for good or for ill, from the grip of a century ago. It also helped that the editor went with footnotes rather than endnotes: the amount of flipping may have built up my biceps, but I would have had a hard time engaging as well with the work.
It is rather odd that the richer & happier people are the worse are their crimes. So we have to come back to Satan I suppose. (Nancy, 1970)
One interviewer said 'What did your father do? 'Nothing.' 'Nothing?' I remember being asked the same except that I said English people made such huge amounts from the slave trade they've never had to work since. Sir Oz [(Oswald Mosley)] was cross with Honky [(Diana Mosley, born Mitford)] & said she ought to have answered 'he was in agriculture' but, as she says, that would have been a plain lie. (Nancy, 1972)
But isn't it touching that the Americans still go on seeing themselves as simple good & honest compared with the twisty Europeans!! The rest of the world regards their cold cruelty with terror. (Nancy, 1972)
Talking of language difficulty Tony says Selwyn Lloyd introduced him to Khrushchev saying 'He's the best shot in England', & the translator said 'Lord Lambton is to be shot tomorrow'. Khrushchev thought it quite normal but patted him on the shoulder kindly. (Diana, 1998)
June 5, 2019
Reading these letters has really underlined to me how crucial Fanny Logan Wyncham, narrator of The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate is to those books--she is the most human character, and contrasts vividly with the Radlett family, who were based on the Mitfords.
Charlotte Mosley has apparently done quite well making a living off the papers of her Mitford in-laws, but she hasn't helped their public images the way Nancy Mitford did with the novels. Perhaps if she had put explanatory paragraphs between letters she might have softened things. But by confining her background information to openings to each chapter and endless footnotes that distract, she has left the sisters letters to fend for themselves--and they don't come off well.
Being the granddaughter of Ashkenazi Jews who would have perished in the Holocaust if they hadn't immigrated here, I find Diana and Unity (especially Unity) and their virulent anti-Semitism, interposed with banal chat about clothes and social outings, repellent. And no matter how "witty" they were, even the other sisters don't come off well here in their letters, which really expose their pettiness, their self-centered behavior, and their various fanaticisms.
I will continue to enjoy the books, and I am happy to have just found the excellent Thames TV version made of the books in the 1980s on YouTube--far better than the recent BBC version. But I think that I have read enough bios of the Mitfords now.
Charlotte Mosley has apparently done quite well making a living off the papers of her Mitford in-laws, but she hasn't helped their public images the way Nancy Mitford did with the novels. Perhaps if she had put explanatory paragraphs between letters she might have softened things. But by confining her background information to openings to each chapter and endless footnotes that distract, she has left the sisters letters to fend for themselves--and they don't come off well.
Being the granddaughter of Ashkenazi Jews who would have perished in the Holocaust if they hadn't immigrated here, I find Diana and Unity (especially Unity) and their virulent anti-Semitism, interposed with banal chat about clothes and social outings, repellent. And no matter how "witty" they were, even the other sisters don't come off well here in their letters, which really expose their pettiness, their self-centered behavior, and their various fanaticisms.
I will continue to enjoy the books, and I am happy to have just found the excellent Thames TV version made of the books in the 1980s on YouTube--far better than the recent BBC version. But I think that I have read enough bios of the Mitfords now.
August 1, 2015
Fascinating glimpse into the lives of the Mitford sisters, who provoked, outraged, and at the very least made for interesting press over many decades of the twentieth century. Two sisters became Nazi sympathizers and actually knew Hitler ("Adolph was so sweet at lunch today..."). One eloped with a Churchill cousin and became a Communist and later a muckraking author. One became a successful novelist, one devoted her life to livestock and her farm. The youngest married into British aristocracy, became the Duchess of Devonshire, and moved in the most rarefied levels of British society.
Their devotion to each other, their spats, their trenchant observations, and their general comings and goings make for fun reading. And the writing style--full of witty family shorthand and running jokes--so entertaining. I may incorporate some of their expressions into my own email style and annoy my family for the next few decades. Shrieks! Do admit.
Their devotion to each other, their spats, their trenchant observations, and their general comings and goings make for fun reading. And the writing style--full of witty family shorthand and running jokes--so entertaining. I may incorporate some of their expressions into my own email style and annoy my family for the next few decades. Shrieks! Do admit.
March 26, 2013
I really enjoyed reading their letters. They all have such strong voices and they all really made me laugh. The tragic parts are even more tragic with the resilience the women had. I loved all of their commentaries on getting old. Rather profound but equally amusing, as with every other topic. The notes added by the author are very helpful considering they're all using their own Mitford language! The nicknames and so on.
The only thing I didn't like was the fact that it was so long, but I don't think there's anything I would have taken out. Plus as they were all short letters it was easy to pick up and put down.
The only thing I didn't like was the fact that it was so long, but I don't think there's anything I would have taken out. Plus as they were all short letters it was easy to pick up and put down.
February 13, 2018
Como dice una amiga mía, hay matrimonios que han durado menos que el tiempo que he tardado en leer este libro.
Me ha entusiasmado. La parte mala, la letra enana y mi falta de costumbre de leer ya en papel.
Editoriales, quiero pagar por vuestras ediciones digitales, hacedlas.
Este libro lo hubiera leído en digital y además conservado en papel, son fascinantes y conocían A TODO EL MUNDO.
He marcado montones de cosas. Lo recomiendo locamente, claro.
Me ha entusiasmado. La parte mala, la letra enana y mi falta de costumbre de leer ya en papel.
Editoriales, quiero pagar por vuestras ediciones digitales, hacedlas.
Este libro lo hubiera leído en digital y además conservado en papel, son fascinantes y conocían A TODO EL MUNDO.
He marcado montones de cosas. Lo recomiendo locamente, claro.
February 17, 2020
I've decided to cultivate an obsession with the Mitfords in 2020, and after reading The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, this was my first port of call. Absolutely the right move - I couldn't stop reading, and fell headfirst into their insane world of celebrity friendships, political squabbles and betrayals and deaths. I now want five sisters to become penpals with.
July 24, 2011
Absolute blissikins, do admit
November 17, 2015
An amazing family....these sisters tore up the 1930s and 40s.....
April 4, 2017
"Wouldn't it be dread if one had a) no sisters b) sisters who didn't write." Deborah to Diana, 1965.
Spanning the years between 1925 and 2002, this volume includes selected letters between the six celebrated Mitford sisters - Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Few families have been the object of such fascination and writings, both during and after their lifetime and little wonder - the six sisters included a novelist, a country farmer, a Fascist, a Nazi, a Communist, and a Duchess. Considering that all but Unity and Pamela were published authors during their lifetime, its little wonder that the sisters kept up a furious correspondence between them (well, between the ones who were speaking anyway). This frank and revealing epistolary collection reveals the heart of the relationship between the sisters, as well as revealing their personalities and takes on the life and times of their family. Although letters from all the sisters is included, Unity, because of her early death, and Pamela, because of her retiring personality, are featured the least. Deborah, because of her decades' long role as the peacemaker and matriarch of the family after their mother's death (despite being the youngest sister), is featured the most.
This is far from the first text I have read on the Mitford sisters. For the novice Mitford fan, I doubt this is a good starting point. The editor does provide a succinct overview periodically to provide some context for the letters, but a joint biography, such as the ones by Mary S. Lovell or Laura Thompson would be more ideal introductions to this remarkable family.
It was disappointing how few early letters exist between the sisters. In many ways, their childhood, which takes on almost mythical proportions and the details of which were hotly contested among the various sisters, was long gone by the time this correspondence really begins. Additionally, although the editor clearly had to make hard decisions about what to include, the lack of inclusion of letters from their brother Tom Mitford or the girls' mother Sydney seemed amiss - particularly as while she was alive, their mother kept up regular correspondence with all the sisters. It was also amusing to see the casual way the sisters have of referencing the exalted social circles they moved in - including references to the Kennedys, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, the Prince of Wales, Lady Bird Johnson, and others. Also striking is the overly fond terms used by Unity and Diana to describe Hitler: "the Fuhrer is the kindest man in the world isn't he?" (135). But their social position, historical placement, shocking choices, and boisterous personalities were indeed what made them famous in the first place.
The editor notes that in total, the sisters correspondence consists of roughly twelve thousand letters, far more than could ever be included in one volume. Indeed, she notes that only roughly five percent of their letters are included in the over 800 pages of this book. Mosley has done an excellent job of identifying letters that sisters' personalities, major life events, and tenor of the relationship between them. The chosen letters beautifully capture the inside jokes, complicated web of nicknames, and hidden lore of the Mitford's shared history.
Spanning the years between 1925 and 2002, this volume includes selected letters between the six celebrated Mitford sisters - Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Few families have been the object of such fascination and writings, both during and after their lifetime and little wonder - the six sisters included a novelist, a country farmer, a Fascist, a Nazi, a Communist, and a Duchess. Considering that all but Unity and Pamela were published authors during their lifetime, its little wonder that the sisters kept up a furious correspondence between them (well, between the ones who were speaking anyway). This frank and revealing epistolary collection reveals the heart of the relationship between the sisters, as well as revealing their personalities and takes on the life and times of their family. Although letters from all the sisters is included, Unity, because of her early death, and Pamela, because of her retiring personality, are featured the least. Deborah, because of her decades' long role as the peacemaker and matriarch of the family after their mother's death (despite being the youngest sister), is featured the most.
This is far from the first text I have read on the Mitford sisters. For the novice Mitford fan, I doubt this is a good starting point. The editor does provide a succinct overview periodically to provide some context for the letters, but a joint biography, such as the ones by Mary S. Lovell or Laura Thompson would be more ideal introductions to this remarkable family.
It was disappointing how few early letters exist between the sisters. In many ways, their childhood, which takes on almost mythical proportions and the details of which were hotly contested among the various sisters, was long gone by the time this correspondence really begins. Additionally, although the editor clearly had to make hard decisions about what to include, the lack of inclusion of letters from their brother Tom Mitford or the girls' mother Sydney seemed amiss - particularly as while she was alive, their mother kept up regular correspondence with all the sisters. It was also amusing to see the casual way the sisters have of referencing the exalted social circles they moved in - including references to the Kennedys, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, the Prince of Wales, Lady Bird Johnson, and others. Also striking is the overly fond terms used by Unity and Diana to describe Hitler: "the Fuhrer is the kindest man in the world isn't he?" (135). But their social position, historical placement, shocking choices, and boisterous personalities were indeed what made them famous in the first place.
The editor notes that in total, the sisters correspondence consists of roughly twelve thousand letters, far more than could ever be included in one volume. Indeed, she notes that only roughly five percent of their letters are included in the over 800 pages of this book. Mosley has done an excellent job of identifying letters that sisters' personalities, major life events, and tenor of the relationship between them. The chosen letters beautifully capture the inside jokes, complicated web of nicknames, and hidden lore of the Mitford's shared history.
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July 13, 2023Quite an astonishing book — letters between the 6 Mitford sisters: the daughters in an aristocratic English family who were all born between 1905 and 1920. The correspondence spans the best part of the 20th century, and the elite social sphere of the sisters sees them interact with many historical figures, from writers to dictators. That really struck me reading this — how small the world at the top is. There are so few people born that well off/who reach such power that they all know each other and hold the vast majority of influence across government and industry alike.
Since I am one of five sisters I was intrigued by the Mitfords and found their in jokes and world of references relatable. All of them were excellent writers and many of the letters very entertaining and laugh out loud funny — I raced through this despite its 800 pages. However a lot of it was uncomfortable too — the letters between the fascist sisters gushing over Hitler a particularly weird section. I have to say right to the end I agreed with the home office’s assessment of Diana as a very dangerous and sinister woman. I didn’t like how the editor (Diana’s daughter in law) seemed to always interpret Nancy’s assessment of Diana and her husband as down to jealousy rather than the fact she may well have felt a little afraid or genuinely uncomfortable around them…
What was striking is the sheer amount of time the letters cover. It’s humbling to race through someone’s life as well as nearly 100 years of history reading this. Most moving to me were Jessica’s letters, her craving to be understood by the people she loved the most. And her never quite arriving at that.
Since I am one of five sisters I was intrigued by the Mitfords and found their in jokes and world of references relatable. All of them were excellent writers and many of the letters very entertaining and laugh out loud funny — I raced through this despite its 800 pages. However a lot of it was uncomfortable too — the letters between the fascist sisters gushing over Hitler a particularly weird section. I have to say right to the end I agreed with the home office’s assessment of Diana as a very dangerous and sinister woman. I didn’t like how the editor (Diana’s daughter in law) seemed to always interpret Nancy’s assessment of Diana and her husband as down to jealousy rather than the fact she may well have felt a little afraid or genuinely uncomfortable around them…
What was striking is the sheer amount of time the letters cover. It’s humbling to race through someone’s life as well as nearly 100 years of history reading this. Most moving to me were Jessica’s letters, her craving to be understood by the people she loved the most. And her never quite arriving at that.
September 19, 2020
"Ha! A letter saying some North Vietmaniens will be in Paris on Sunday and will I be sure to go & meet them - Vanessa Redgrave's flying up from Rome (you bet she is). No, I will not. You may disapprove of people being set fire to without wanting to meet them."
This particular passage was written in a letter from Nancy in 1968 and for better or worse, is a pretty good illustration of why she will always be my favorite Mitford.
800+ pages of letters was a lot to read and yet I never got tired of it. Four stars instead of five because (in my biased, Nancy-loving mind) it felt like the editor, Diana's daughter-in-law, may have had a bit of a bias herself. Certainly the two who were still alive during the compiling of this collection (Diana and Deborah) got the most air time.
All the same I can't imagine sifting through 12,000 or so letters and putting together over 70 years' worth of them, and having it all come out in the end as something that makes sense. Footnotes were extensive but helpfully placed at the end of each letter instead of pages ahead (though on a Kindle I think it would have been totally annoying). Helpful notes at the beginning of each section gave the right amount of context.
Bottom line is that if you know nothing about the Mitfords, this is not the place to start. If you already love them and feel like you'd love to read their letters through decades, you are most likely right.
This particular passage was written in a letter from Nancy in 1968 and for better or worse, is a pretty good illustration of why she will always be my favorite Mitford.
800+ pages of letters was a lot to read and yet I never got tired of it. Four stars instead of five because (in my biased, Nancy-loving mind) it felt like the editor, Diana's daughter-in-law, may have had a bit of a bias herself. Certainly the two who were still alive during the compiling of this collection (Diana and Deborah) got the most air time.
All the same I can't imagine sifting through 12,000 or so letters and putting together over 70 years' worth of them, and having it all come out in the end as something that makes sense. Footnotes were extensive but helpfully placed at the end of each letter instead of pages ahead (though on a Kindle I think it would have been totally annoying). Helpful notes at the beginning of each section gave the right amount of context.
Bottom line is that if you know nothing about the Mitfords, this is not the place to start. If you already love them and feel like you'd love to read their letters through decades, you are most likely right.
December 7, 2022
Si os interesan las Mitford esta lectura es un paso obligatorio que no os va a defraudar.
Las cartas entre ellas nos ayudan a poner luz entre las relaciones menos conocidas de las hermanas y también nos quitan los prejuicios que podamos tener al respecto.
En este caso, Nancy sale bastante mal parada al demostrarse sus falsedades y mentiras cuando leemos las cartas que les dedicaba a sus hermanas, y otras como Jessica o Diana salen reforzadas.
Muy recomendable.
https://lahierbaroja.com/2022/12/02/l...
Las cartas entre ellas nos ayudan a poner luz entre las relaciones menos conocidas de las hermanas y también nos quitan los prejuicios que podamos tener al respecto.
En este caso, Nancy sale bastante mal parada al demostrarse sus falsedades y mentiras cuando leemos las cartas que les dedicaba a sus hermanas, y otras como Jessica o Diana salen reforzadas.
Muy recomendable.
https://lahierbaroja.com/2022/12/02/l...
March 12, 2022
This extensive collection of letters between the Mitford sisters was interesting - sometimes fun, sometimes tragic and definately gave a glimpse into the intimate world they lived in. I must admit to skipping letters especially towards the end of the book. I think I found the correspondence more interesting when they were younger. Whilst these were intimate personal letters it was interesting to put them in the context of the world they girls were living in which made histrory seem alive.
July 10, 2018
Fuelled my obsession and love for the Mitford sisters even more. It was interesting to learn their stories from their own perspectives. Because I’m only 20 I found it quite difficult to keep up with who most of their friends were (I did A LOT of googling) which is why I haven’t given this book 5 stars.
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