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Mitford sisters' world, The
Radical Society, Apr 2002 by Levy, Lisa
the sisters: the saga of the mitford girls by mary lovell
1. The Wonderful World of Mitford
"Oh, why do all my daughters fall for dictators?" Lady Redesdale exclaimed to her eldest daughter, Nancy Mitford, when she confessed her affair with Colonel Gaston Palewski, a French diplomat in De Gaulle's inner circle. This anecdote, which has all of the dramatic punch of Nancy's best-selling fiction of the 1940s, is recounted without comment in Mary Lovell's The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Girls. Lovell misses the opportunity to make hay here and many other places, but her account does tell the family story in a way that should inspire others to unleash their scythes and pitchforks on a splendid and engaging family. One especially longs to hear "Queen of the Teasers" Nancy's reply to her mother's rhetorical question-which is, incidentally, both valid and telling-something along the lines of, "But Muv, you fell for one too."
For those uninitiated into the wonderful world of Mitford and Mitfordiana, Lovell neatly chronicles a "select family tree": Sydney Bowles, daughter of a "consistently eccentric, back-bench M.P." married David Mitford, a cousin of the Churchills, in 1904. Mitford became the second Lord Redesdale in 1915, and the couple had seven children, six girls and one boy, in the following order: Nancy (born in 1904), Pamela (1907), Thomas (1909), Diana (1910), Unity (1914), Jessica (1917, called Decca), and Deborah (1920, called Debo). A list of their most dubious achievements-a Miffords' cheat sheet-might also be in order here. Nancy was a novelist and historian of some note, and a stalwart of the smart set known as the Bright Young Things. Diana was the mistress and then wife of Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. The British press called her Mrs. Hitler-or was that title reserved for Unity Valkyrie, whose intimacy with the Fuhrer netted her an apartment that had been vacated by a Jewish family who suddenly "went abroad"? Finally, there was Decca, who escaped to America, where she was a staunch Communist, muckraker, and author of the classic expose The American Way of Death. The other three siblings led quieter lives.
The Mitfords were a one-generation British dynasty whose name was synonymous with a curious combination of frivolity and serious political commitment, one of those ruling-class families whose lives and progeny were larger and more dramatic than ordinary people's. Families like this-the Kennedys spring to mind as American equivalents-are simultaneously welcoming and exclusive. These fantasy families are better-looking, tighter-knit versions of our own families (happy or not), like the people at a party laughing loudly at in-jokes they'd be happy to explain but you could never possibly understand. Lovell's group biography of the Mitford sisters retells the jokes but, alas, cannot possibly explain them, because she, too, is on the outside. Only Diana and Debo are still alive to participate in Lovell's book, and though Lovell had access to some letters and other written accounts of the deceased, her book is decidedly skewed toward the living sisters' versions of events. As these two were in direct conflict with others in the family for much of the post-World War II period, Lovell's "saga" unceremoniously dismisses Nancy's hilarious family stories as literary license and Communist Decca's as a too-easy conflation of her upper-class family with "the enemy."
For people who were quite famous for many years, the Mitfords have unceremoniously fallen out of public consciousness. Their rise and fall can be attributed to the nature of their fame: the Mitfords made headlines because they were controversial aristocrats, adjectives that now seem banal but that once squirmed uncomfortably when seated together. Lovell claims when she would talk about this book that recognition of the Mitford name and history was immediate for people over fifty; those younger would nod politely and ask, "Who are they?" But time was that the Mitfords were so well scrutinized that Decca reported that her mother sighed whenever she saw "Peer's Daughter" in a headline, "I know it's going to be something about one of you children." This must have caused Lady Redesdale considerable pain, as she subscribed to the old chestnut that a lady's name should appear in print only upon her birth, marriage, and death. While keeping track of the rich and otherwise noteworthy has now become rote, the Mitfords belonged to an age when a scandal was really scandalous, and good people stopped associating with those whose names appeared in boldface in the newspapers.
Being scandalous and well documented certainly contributed to the fascination with the Mitford sisters, who belonged first to the celebrated realm of the Bright Young Things-the British Jazz babies with a similar bent for all-night parties and quotable slang-and then to the harsh days of World War II and the nostalgic Anglophilia that followed. Lovell is content to dwell in the spirit of the early, frothy times; her mission has less to do with telling the truth than repackaging the myths of the English rural aristocracy. Lovell's entre into the Mitford's world comes as the result of a dinner party in Gloustershire in the 1980s, where a woman called Pamela Jackson (nee Mitford) "was interested in my hunter, Flashman, and his breeding." She does not inform us as to whether anything came of that gentle inquiry, but the giddy, movie-star-like enchantment she has for the upper-crust Mitfords animates The Sisters.
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