The Mitford Sisters: Lives of Notoriety
The Mitford Sisters, descended from a long line of
English aristocrats, achieved contemporary notoriety for their disparate politics and public feuds during the Second World War.
The six sisters - Nancy, Jessica (nicknamed Decca), Unity, Deborah, Diana, and Pamela - held extremely public lives that contributed to the controversy surrounding the family.
Decca joined the American communist party. Her sister Unity counted herself among Adolf Hitler’s friends while another sister, Deborah, left her first husband for the British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. Deborah was interned in Holloway Prison during the war. Meanwhile Pamela, after her divorce from a wealthy scientist, spent the remainder of her life living with her companion Giuditta Tommasi, an Italian horsewoman.
Nancy and Decca became well-known writers. Nancy wrote mostly novels, many of which were recently reprinted by Vintage, with introductions from a cast of contemporary writers. These introductions really add to the value of revisiting these classics. In her introduction to Nancy’s most autobiographical novel, The Pursuit of Love, novelist Zoe Heller notes that, much like the sisters, Nancy’s writing often met with fervor: “Mitford’s fiction is strong meat. Readers who love it....tend to love it with a dotty passion; others, who escape the enchantment, are apt to despise it...”
Decca tended toward muckrakers and memoirs, writing several volumes of each. She was a prolific letter writer; and Peter Y. Sussman has collected her letters in Decca (Knopf, $35). Interest in the sisters and their lives over recent years have lead to frequent publication of biographies about the family, notably The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (W. W. Norton, $18.95), by Mary S. Lovell, and The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (Harper Perennial, $19.95), edited by Charlotte Mosley.
- Lacey Dunham