The Sisters

Mary S. Lovell's biography traces the relationships among the six Mitford sisters, drawing on previously unseen family papers, personal interviews with the surviving sisters Diana and Deborah ("Debo"), and the private archive of Jessica ("Decca") Mitford at Ohio State University. Lovell notes that what she anticipated as a lighthearted biography revealed how quickly the sisters' childhood mirth disintegrated into conflict, private passions, and tragedies driven by polarized ideologies.

David Mitford, a Boer War veteran who lost a lung in combat, later served with distinction in the First World War before inheriting the title of 2nd Baron Redesdale. Sydney Bowles, daughter of an eccentric MP and magazine publisher, had run her widowed father's London household from the age of fourteen. The couple married in 1904 and had seven children: Nancy (1904), Pamela (1907), Tom (1909), Diana (1910), Unity (1914), Jessica (1917), and Deborah (1920). Only Tom was sent away to school; the girls were educated at home by governesses using the Parents' National Education Union (PNEU) curriculum, a decision several daughters resented despite the fact that four became bestselling writers.

Their early years at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire and later at Swinbrook House were shaped by David's explosive humor, Sydney's cool reserve, and the siblings' constant play. Nancy, the eldest, was a merciless tease whose wit endeared her even to her victims. Unity and Jessica developed their own secret language, Boudledidge, while Jessica and Deborah founded the Society of Hons, an invented private club based in the linen cupboard. Laura Dicks, known as "Nanny Blor," provided the emotional warmth the children craved and stayed with the family for nearly thirty years.

As the sisters came of age, their paths diverged. Nancy entered London Society and befriended the Oxford aesthetes of the so-called Brideshead generation. Diana, the acknowledged family beauty, married Bryan Guinness, heir to a brewing fortune, in 1929 and became a leader of fashionable London. Pamela, the quietest sister, loved country life and cooking, earning the family nickname "Woman."

The pivotal year was 1932. At a dinner party that spring, Diana met the charismatic politician Sir Oswald Mosley and fell passionately in love. Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) later that year, advocating totalitarian government as an alternative to both failed capitalism and feared Communism. Diana left Bryan despite fierce family opposition. When Mosley's wife Cimmie died suddenly of peritonitis in May 1933, opinion hardened against Diana, who became a social outcast. She and Mosley married secretly on 6 October 1936 in the Berlin apartment of senior Nazi official Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, with Hitler as guest of honor and Unity as witness.

Unity had developed an obsessive fascination with Hitler after attending the 1933 Nuremberg rally with Diana. Moving to Munich in 1934, she frequented Hitler's favorite restaurant until he invited her to his table on 9 February 1935. Over the next four years they met approximately 140 times. Unity wrote a virulently anti-Semitic letter to Julius Streicher's propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer, declaring herself "a Jew hater," and accepted a Munich apartment taken from a Jewish couple, an act that placed her beyond historical rehabilitation.

Jessica's trajectory ran in the opposite direction. Reading about mass unemployment, she discovered socialism while Unity embraced Fascism; in their shared room, posters of Lenin faced posters of Hitler across a dividing line. In 1937, at nineteen, Jessica eloped with Esmond Romilly, an eighteen-year-old left-wing rebel recently returned from fighting with the International Brigade, a volunteer force supporting the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. The elopement dominated the British press for weeks. The couple married in Bayonne, France, lost their infant daughter Julia to measles-related pneumonia, and emigrated to America in February 1939.

The outbreak of war shattered the family. On the day Britain declared war on Germany, Unity walked into Munich's Englischer Garten and shot herself in the temple. She survived, but the bullet lodged in her brain, leaving her with permanent cognitive damage. Sydney and Deborah brought her home through a press siege. David and Sydney's irreconcilable views on Germany destroyed their marriage; they separated permanently, though they corresponded almost daily.

In May 1940, Mosley was arrested under Emergency Rule 18B, which permitted indefinite detention of anyone deemed a security risk. Diana was arrested a month later; Nancy had informed the authorities that Diana was "extremely dangerous." Diana endured over three years in Holloway Prison, separated from her young sons, who were taken in by Pamela. The Mosleys were released under house arrest in November 1943, triggering mass protests.

In America, Esmond enlisted in the Canadian Royal Air Force and was killed on 30 November 1941 when his aircraft was lost over the North Sea. Jessica threw herself into wartime work, met Jewish lawyer Robert Treuhaft, and married him in June 1943. She joined the Communist Party and became an activist for civil rights. Tom, the only son and the one family member welcome in every faction, was killed in Burma on 30 March 1945. David and Sydney never recovered from his death.

Nancy's literary career provided a counterpoint to the tragedies. Unhappily married to the charming but unreliable Peter Rodd, she fell in love in 1942 with Gaston Palewski, Charles de Gaulle's chief of staff. The affair inspired The Pursuit of Love (1945), which sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year. Nancy moved to Paris in 1946, producing bestselling novels and biographies including Noblesse Oblige (1956), whose playful distinction between "U" (upper-class) and "non-U" speech made her an arbiter of manners for a generation.

Jessica launched her own literary career with Hons and Rebels (1960), a memoir that delighted the public but distressed her family with its exaggerations. Her exposé The American Way of Death (1963) held the number-one bestseller position for months and changed American attitudes toward the funeral industry.

The later decades brought further losses. Unity died in 1948 of meningitis from her old head wound. In 1955, Jessica and Robert's ten-year-old son Nicholas was killed by a bus, a blow from which Jessica never recovered. David died in 1958, and Sydney died at Inch Kenneth, the family's Scottish island, in 1963. Nancy endured years of Hodgkin's disease before dying in 1973 with Palewski at her side. During Nancy's illness, Jessica visited three times from California, managing civil contact with Diana despite decades of estrangement. Pamela died in 1994. Jessica, who never reconciled with Diana, died of lung cancer in July 1996. At her memorial service, six plumed black horses and an antique glass hearse waited outside, a final tease on the woman who had spent her career mocking the funeral industry.

Diana and Deborah survived as the last of the sisters. Diana celebrated her ninetieth birthday in 2000 and lived in a Paris apartment. Deborah, who had married Andrew Cavendish in 1941 and became Duchess of Devonshire when his father died in 1950, faced a devastating 80 percent death-duty tax bill that threatened to destroy the family estate, Chatsworth. Over 24 years she and Andrew sold land, paintings, and properties to save the house, ultimately transforming Chatsworth into one of Europe's great treasure houses.