Mitford sisters' world, The

As the Mitfords were not given Cedric's training, Nancy sought it out on her own from the Bright Young Things. Pam, known as "Woman" for her motherly qualities, was the only one of the Mitfords suited to country living and thus content to keep company with animals and her younger siblings; she sits the entire BYT phenomenon out. Diana, however, gets swept up in the parties along with Nancy, and in this set she met Guinness, nearly considered an unacceptable suitor by her parents because he was so ridiculously rich. Nancy, made "spinsterish" by her younger sister's marriage in 1928, takes up writing, Lovell tells us, in part to counter feelings of uselessness. She started out contributing short, first-person pieces to various society pages. Her first novel, Highland Fling, whose hero was based on her debonair gay fiance, Hamish St. Clair Erskine, came out in the shadow of her friend Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, published in January 1930 and dedicated to Bryan and Diana. Vile Bodies contains this marvelous description of the excesses of the BYTs:

(... Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as someone else, almost naked parties in St. John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs... parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris-- all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.... Those vile bodies .... )

Waugh's novel was a genuine sensation, and the newspapers helped make the BYTs a national fixation. Highland Fling sold respectably for a first novel, but it wasn't until a decade and a couple of books later that Nancy mined the material of her childhood and hit her stride as a writer. The publication of these books inaugurates the "odious" (to the family) age of the "Mitford Industry."

The irony of aristocrats creating an industry of their own arcana was hardly lost on the Mitfords. The "Industry," Decca wrote in her introduction to the 1982 reissue of Nancy's Radlett novels, hit its heights around 1979, when historian Harold Acton's memoir of Nancy Mitford, as well as a biography of Unity, Diana's autobiography, and Decca's second memoir chronicling her years in the American Communist Party, A Fine Old Conflict, were all in bookstores. Around the same time, there was a musical based on the family playing on the London stage cleverly titled "The Mitford Girls," which Debo "cruelly dubbed `La Triviata."' Several Mitford friends and descendents have profited off of the family name, as nearly every major player inside and close to the Mitfords has written something about them (see Lovell's bibliography for specifics). The Industry has future projected earnings from a forthcoming collection of Decca's never-before published letters, and Diana's granddaughter, Charlotte Mosley, is currently assembling letters passed among all six sisters. Lovell is not the only one who just can't get enough of the Mitfords.