Unity,Diana, Jessica, Nancy, Pamela and Deborah. Or, if you prefer: a Nazi with a self-inflicted brain injury, Oswald Mosley's wife, a communist muckraker, an infamous snob/talented novelist, a muse of John Betjeman turned late-in-life lesbian and the Duchess of Devonshire.
Call the Mitford sisters what you will - and they've been accused of many things - but you could never call them boring.
Since the millennium, there's been a resurgence of interest in these famous aristocrats, from Jan Dalley's biography of Diana to the BBC adaptation of Nancy's Love in a Cold Climate and a biography of the author by family friend Harold Acton. But my interest in the family was piqued by Mary S Lovell's excellent and insightful The Mitford Girls and I've been alternately disgusted and beguiled by them ever since.
This autumn sees a further expansion of the Mitford industry, with the publication of two new books of Mitford correspondence: first, the paperback release of Decca, a doorstop-sized collection of Jessica ("Decca") Mitford's letters edited by Peter Y Sussman, which is a pretty comprehensive attempt to capture the personality of the famous author and rebel. Decca was the Mitford who made the strongest attempts to break free from her background, running away to America, joining the communist party and becoming known in the US as a writer of bold exposés, including her landmark work The American Way of Death.
Also just out is another hefty volume, Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. Edited by Charlotte Mosley, Diana's daughter-in-law, this book collects together for the first time some of the hundreds of letters between the "girls". The youngest, and only living Mitford sister, Debo - or the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, if you prefer - has given it her seal of approval.
I'm salivating at the prospect of both books.
Not that I endorse many of the sisters' points of view, of course: Unity was such an unrepentant Nazi that she shot herself when the second world war broke out (becoming brain-damaged and incontinent, but by all counts much more placid, as a result). And Diana never apologised for the friendship with Hitler that landed her in jail. But the Mitford sisters are inherently fascinating. Nancy's books brilliantly satirise the strangeness and insularity of their upbringing (even if her sisters never quite forgave her for doing so). And having read Lovell's book plus two volumes of Nancy's correspondence, I know that Mitford letters pull no punches as alliances are established, rivalries strengthened and friendships made and broken, all via the postal service.
But it's not just the sisters' own lives that are so interesting, it's the way their lives often intersected with other important figures of the 20th century. Related to everyone from Winston Churchill to Walter Mosley, with family friends including Hitler, Evelyn Waugh and Maya Angelou, the Mitford sisters were kind of proto-Forrest Gumps, always on the edge of history and sometimes actively involved. Decca, especially, threw herself into civil rights work and Nancy and her first husband helped victims of the civil war in Spain. (Still, during the second world war, Decca wrote to Nancy that she wasn't so much worried about her family dying as of having "a v. narst time in general".)
Totally un-PC, relics of a lost era and sometimes solipsistic to an unimaginable degree? No doubt. But as chroniclers of a large family participating in many of the major political movements of the 20th century, there have never been six sisters more entertaining.
As the Mitfords themselves would say: do admit.
COURTESY:THE GUARDIAN
