Mad About The Mitfords

By Laura Miller

From the 1940s to the 1980s, the Mitford Industry (as the Mitfords themselves jokingly called it) produced several best-selling books, films, a television documentary and even a musical by and about that lively clan. At the center of it all were six beautiful, witty and controversial British sisters whose friendships ranged from the likes of Lytton Strachey to Maya Angelou, Joseph Goebbels to John Kennedy. They had, in the words of their most recent biographer, Mary S. Lovell, a "remarkable energy, joie de vivre and self-confidence" that made them seem almost like mythological creatures. Yet as Lovell notes in her introduction to The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (Norton; 611 pages; $29.95), people younger than 50 probably haven't heard of the Mitford girls at all.

The progeny of Lord Redesdale, and his wife Sydney, the Mitfords (Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, Deborah and their brother Tom) grew up in "a sort of upper-class poverty" (which entailed, at its worst, six servants). They referred to their eccentric parents as "Farve" (their father had such a formidable temper that he banned the Duchess of Marlborough from his home because she left a paper handkerchief on a hedge) and "Muv" (their slightly dotty mother considered dinner napkins an extravagance). Nancy, the eldest child, would capture both their peculiar family life and the milieu of the "Bright Young Things"--the flippant, modern young aristocrats of the 1930s--in her fizzy comic novels, The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949).

But even before Nancy's books became international hits, the sisters were notorious; the "Mad, Mad Mitfords," the press loved to call them. Diana, a spectacular beauty, married an heir to the Guinness fortune but then jettisoned him to take up with Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of Britain's fascist party, which, Lovell says, made her "arguably the most hated woman in England." Just as scandalous was Unity, a close friend of Adolf Hitler's and so worshipfully devoted to him that she shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany (she survived with some brain damage; Hitler paid her German hospital bills). Jessica ("Decca"), a restless would-be communist, eloped with a cousin who was also Winston Churchill's nephew. She later moved to the U.S. and had great success with her muckraking book on the funeral industry, The American Way of Death.

Lovell, who is the sort of writer who refers to "hare coursing" without elucidation and uses expressions like "mad keen," is perhaps too embedded in the Mitfords' world to provide the perfect introduction for contemporary American readers. Nevertheless, books containing such choice lines as Muv's lament, "Oh, why do all my daughters fall for dictators?" are few indeed, and we must cherish every one of them.

--By Laura Miller