My review of Jonathon & Catherine Guinness's The House of Mitford

The House of Mitford

by 

Jonathan Guinness,

 with 

Catherine Guinness

My rating 5 out of 5 stars

After this sitting considerably far down my Mitford history reading list, I was taken by its erudition. My expectations were cynical, knowing it was penned by family insiders: author Jonathon Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne, is the eldest son of Diana Mitford Mosley by her first husband Bryan Guinness; his co-author is his daughter the Hon. Catherine Guinness. My tainted expectations could not have been wider off the mark.

Not only is there a marked absence of family bias, but the wordsmithing outshines every Mitford biography I have read. He does his forebears proud, his craftsmanship a testament to this clever bloodline. His being schooled at Eton and Oxford, one might expect this standard, but others with similar academic foundations have produced less impressive works.

I did not find, as certain readers have implied, any pro-Conservative slant to the narrative (the author was a Conservative Party Parliamentary Candidate). Wary of rightwing undertones, I here found objectivity from start to finish. Graced with impartiality, the content may stop short of censuring history's political right, which is not tantamount to partisanship.

I did sense, in certain of Jonathon Guinness's references to his novelist aunt Nancy Mitford, subtle retributory tones on behalf of his mother Diana who spent most of WWII in prison partly thanks Nancy. That history, well documented by all Mitford biographers, goes like this:

After leaving her first husband for British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley, Diana spent time in Germany with Hitler and his inner-circle in the prelude to WWII, aiming for a Nazi-approved radio station for the BUF which never eventuated. When Mosely was imprisoned early in the war under 18B as a potentially dangerous person, Diana was initially left to do much of his bidding on the outside. Nancy was summoned by MI5 to comment on how 'dangerous' she thought her younger sister. Putting patriotic duty before blood, Nancy said she thought Diana 'highly dangerous', swaying the government's decision to lock up Diana too. Separated from her babies, Diana was accordingly detained without charge or trial for years, subject to the horrors of Holloway Jail. Diana never learned of this sisterly betrayal until late in life and Mosley never learned of it.

So, one could understand any tinge of injustice felt on his mother's behalf by this author, who as a youngster witnessed her long imprisonment. Yet this is barely evident, if only hinted at (how much of the text his co-author daughter Catherine contributed is unclear).

The telling of Mosley's career itself is presented minus the fascist-bashing righteousness of many, from a rational 'setting-the-record-straight' standpoint. That seems fair considering the author is Mosley's stepson. It carries no hint of the fascist apologist we might anticipate.

(Prior to this book, after Mosley's death his birth son from his first marriage to Lady Cynthia Mosley, Nicholas Mosley, had written harsh volumes against his fascist father, for which Mosley's widow Diana never forgave her stepson.)

I confess to being least taken by the convoluted earlier histories and lineages of the Mitford sisters' two grandfathers, Algernon Freeman-Mitford ('Barty') and Thomas Gibson-Bowles, as I always am. Even so these are more impeccably detailed than any other Mitford historian's efforts I've encountered.

To call this author's archival prowess masterly is a gross understatement. This book, Mitford descendants can keep in stately libraries and others can consult through the mists of time. I wish I had read this particular Mitford history sooner as it surpasses all others.

With Jonathon Guinness in his early nineties as I write this review of a book published thirty-seven years ago, there still feels to be some carryover from these remarkable sisters, all now long dead.

A self-proclaimed Mitford aficionado, I now see this as the definitive biography of this canon.

My review of Diana Mitford Mosley's Loved Ones: Pen Portraits

Loved Ones: Pen Portraits

by Diana Mitford Mosley

My rating 4 out of 5 stars

Charming reminiscences by arguably the most eloquent published Mitford sister. Diana was perhaps less frivolously funny, in print, than novelist sister Jessica Mitford, less gritty than activist sister Jessica Mitford and less straightforwardly sentimental than duchess sister Deborah Mitford.

This exquisite collection of pen portraits, of central figures from Diana's life, includes memories of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, her onetime neighbours and friends. Violet Hammersley, an author, close friend of her mother's and prominent Mitford childhood figure. Writer, Evelyn Waugh a very close friend. Diana's former brother-in-law Professor Derek Jackson, a leading physicist. Lord Berners, a dear friend she often stayed with at Faringdon House. Prince and Princess Clary, friends of hers after the Second World War. The final portrait is of her second husband Sir Oswald Mosley.

Some are true gems, e.g. Violet Hammersely:

'She was rather small and very dark, with black hair and huge dark eyes, and she had an expression of deep gloom. She had a rather low, hollow voice, and although she often laughed it was as if unwillingly. Her garden, at least the only garden of hers I ever saw, was a discreet green. When I first knew her she was already a widow, and widow's weeds became her. To the end of her life she was swathed in black scarves and shawls and veils; in later years not exactly in mourning, because many of her clothes were dark brown, but the whole effect had something more Spanish than French about it. Once when she was slightly annoying my sister Nancy, who used the powder and lipstick universal among our generation, by saying: "Painters don't admire make-up at all," Nancy retorted: "Oh well Mrs. Ham you know it's all very well for you, but we can't all look like El Greco's mistress."

The book features historic photographs of the subjects.

Actually, three of these pen portraits were republished in Diana's extensive 2008 collection The Pursuit of Laughter, so any fan who has read that collection will only find three unread ones in this earlier, shorter one.

Having, at her lowest point, been dubbed the 'most hated woman in England' for her romantic link to Brit fascist leader Mosley, then spending much of WWII in Holloway jail uncharged under wartime clause 18B, Diana remained disarmingly charming to all who met her. Never becoming bitter, she wrote in a published letter to her sister Debo: 'Being hated, as you know, means nothing to me.'

A remarkable figure of dignity and elegance, she wrote delectably, complete with Mitford 'shrieks' and 'teases' - if of a more understated, tongue-in-cheek variety than those of her published sisters.

A must read for any Mitford fan.

My review of Deborah Mitford's Wait for Me

Wait for Me!

by Deborah Mitford

My rating 5 out of 5 stars

For Mitford sisters fans, Deborah is essential reading. The youngest, she achieved the highest rank, as Duchess of Devonshire. She was too young to know the earlier Mitford households, Batsford House then Asthall Manor, which were mythologised as 'Alconleigh' by sister Nancy in the bestselling semi-autobiographical novel The Pursuit of Love.

Instead, Deborah grew up at Swinbrook, which their father built and the older Mitford girls despised due to its lack of historic charm or communal library (which had been most of their autodidactic bedrock).

In some ways therefore a standalone, Deborah lacked her siblings' unfulfilled yearnings for formal education, instead relishing her rural childhood and many animals. She loved horse riding and many of her father's country interests, which the others (except for 2nd eldest Pam) longed to escape.

Perhaps because of these adored formative years, she was arguably the most well adjusted Mitford girl and was noted for always treating people of every social strata equally.

When She married Lord Andrew Cavendish, younger son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, in 1941, there was no thought of him inheriting the dukedom, the couple living in various bucolic settings on the fringes of her in-laws' estates. She otherwise went around England with her army husband, whose military pay was pretty ordinary.

Only when Andrew's older brother William, Marquess of Hartington, was killed in action in 1944 did he unexpectedly become heir. When Andrew became the 11th Duke of Devonshire on his father death in 1950, Deborah was a Duchess!

Post-war inheritance taxes of 80% approx. (a bill of £7 million or £220 million in 2016) meant selling off much of the vast Dukedom of Devonshire estate to pay for retaining the jewel in its crown, historic Chatsworth House.

As the new Duchess, Deborah faced the mammoth task of resorting Chatsworth, for centuries the Cavendish family seat, which would open to the public to pay for its upkeep. From scratch she learned to restore and maintain one of Britain's foremost stately homes, becoming the face of Chatsworth for decades, at times manning Chatsworth's ticket office herself.

These projects later extended to other heritage listed sites in the estate. In those restorative arts, and in running a stately home, she became an expert, writing around a dozen books on Chatsworth itself, plus numerous works of personal memoir. In 1999, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) by Queen Elizabeth II, for her service to the Royal Collection Trust.

She became Dowager Duchess on her husband's death in 2004 and died herself in 2014 aged 94, the last surviving Mitford sister.

Her memoir Wait for me! takes its title from her being the youngest and therefore the last in early family outings and activities, always running behind trying to catch up on her tiny young legs. Her teasing eldest sister Nancy always said down to earth Deborah had retained the mental age of an eight or nine year old, never acquiring the airs and graces expected of a grand duchess. Of course, this was Nancy's way with all.

Deborah (nicknamed 'Debo' from an early age) entertained and befriended everyone of world importance, from the Kennedys in the 50s and 60s to Prince Charles and Camilla in the new millennium, yet always had some small anecdote about even the humblest servant.

This striking humility, with her gratitude for the good fortune she enjoyed (and quiet stoicism over the losses of three of her seven babies), makes her writing immediate and engaging. Like most of her famous sisters, she had a natural talent for writing and storytelling and was a true eccentric, at strokes fascinating, moving and hilarious.

Not the fanciest Mitford sister, the wittiest or the archest, Debo is the most solid and grounded of those published. Her photographs from over the decades, from angelic infancy, to tulle and diamante bedecked debutante, to hostess of twentieth century world leaders, are breathtaking.

Of all Debo's books, this one in particular is the icing on the cake for any Mitford canon devotee. She does not disappoint!

My review of Diana Mitford Mosley's The Pursuit of Laughter

The Pursuit of Laughter

by 

Diana Mitford Mosley

My rating 5 out of 5 stars

Diana Mitford Mosley, tagged on this book's cover 'The Most Controversial Mitford Sister', died in Paris in 2003 aged 93.

The onetime associate of Adolph Hitler, who attended her 1936 wedding to British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley at Joseph Goebbels' Berlin home, was famously 'unrepentant' to the last about political leanings that led her to Holloway Prison without charge or trial, on MI5's advice, for most of WWII.

'They'll go on persecuting me until I say Hitler was ghastly,' she said in a late life interview. 'Well, what's the point in saying that? We all know that he was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible things. But that doesn't alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure.'

'It was fascinating for me, at 24, to sit and talk with him, to ask him questions and get answers, even if they weren't true ones. No torture on earth would get me to say anything different.'

This brave, frank singularity was her lifelong hallmark, besides her aristocratic standing, two highbrow marriages and legendary beauty, which her novelist friend Evelyn Waugh said 'ran through the room like a peal of bells', with author-friend James Lees-Milne declaring, 'she was the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen'.

But with her sisters seemingly vying for notoriety, rationalising their race with 'Diana started it', her role as instigator of this famous contest would always have had strong readership pull, even had Diana herself never written or published a word.

A selection of diaries, articles, portraits and reviews, introduced by youngest sister, Deborah Mitford, The Pursuit of Laughter (the title a homage to oldest sister Nancy Mitford's 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love) is testament that Diana did write: prolifically, on a mind boggling range, with extraordinary eloquence and despite her lack of formal education.

The six Mitford girls were home schooled, some as infants by their mother under the Parents National Educational Union (PNEU) scheme, but mostly by governesses. An Edwardian upper-class prejudice lingered, that saw public girls' schools middle-class, even common. (Their brother Tom prepped with them until aged eight, then boarded at Eton, eventually reading law in Berlin).

The basics their parents thought customary for gentlewomen were: reading and writing; basic arithmetic for keeping household books; French, deemed essential for their class; enough geography and history to avoid seeming ignorant in polite society; music, needlework and deportment.

Their advantage over peers, however, was free-range access to their Batsford Park home library, the repository of a remarkable collection made by their grandfather, Algernon Freeman-Mitford 1st Lord Redesdale, whose country estates their second-in-line father inherited when his older brother died at war.

This library, which moved house with them to Asthall Manor, their father set up away from the Asthall house, in a barn with armchairs and grand piano. It became their autodidactic meeting point, where the foundations of their intellectual lives were laid.

Unimpeded by adults, they relished being left here to their own devices. While Nancy Mitford and Jessica Mitford longed to be sent to public schools, most of them, especially Diana, shuddered at the thought.

Diana was later a day student at Cours Fénelon finishing school in Paris's rue de la Pompe, the year's enrollment including lectures from visiting Sorbonne professors. In Paris she was painted by her mother's old family friend, Belle Époque portraitist Paul César Helleu, who lived near her hotel and took her around. One such painting appeared in L'Illustration, making her the envy of the school.

Far from home unsupervised, Paris was her first taste of independence.

Her Cours Fénelon year was cut short, however, when she was kept home in disgrace one recess, having left open her diary. Her parents found details of an unchaperoned afternoon cinema date with a young man, which she admitted was 'a frightful disobedience and an almost unforgivable crime.' She wrote 'I learned more at the Cours Fénelon in six months than I learned at Asthall in six years.'

Back in rural England, with the crowding Mitford brood and parents, her London escape would be marriage, sooner the better.

So her higher education was at the school of life, embraced by those 'Bright Young People' of the Roaring Twenties. The literati. Etonion, Oxfordian and Cantabrigan alumni. Writers, artists and great intellectuals who flocked to her and first husband Bryan Guinness, himself a lay poet-novelist, heir to the barony of Moyne and one of England's richest men.

The radiant newlyweds, having wrangled for parental nods to marry so young (eighteen-year-old Diana a freshly presented Court debutante) with the groom's exceptional wealth, were instant leading Society figures. Evelyn Waugh dedicated Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to the couple. Diana's portrait was painted by Augustus John, Pavel Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb.

They drew various sets: aesthetes, like Harold Acton, Robert Byron, Brian Howard, Henry Green, Roy Harrod; pre-jet jetsetters, such as Emerald Cunard, Duff and Diana Cooper, and Lady Violet Astor's daughter; cerebrals, like John Betjemen, Lytton Strachey and his girlfriend Dora Carrington; and Noël Coward's theatre crowd.

Only the dimmest soul could fail to soak much of this up, Diana the antithesis of dim. Not writing about it would have been a far worse crime than anything she might later face suspicion over.

Mitford sister buffs have favourites, mine the eldest Nancy, who mythologised her kin as 'the Radletts' in autobiographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate after Diana 'started it all' by scandalously dumping her besotted millionaire spouse for the much older, married, alpha male political livewire Mosely (who refused to divorce for Diana but, soon prematurely widowed, became marriagable).

(Diana's actions were thought a catalyst of competitive sister Unity's public ingratiation of herself to Hitler. Diana even first brought the pair together, on a German trip to visit their brother Tom, Unity tagging along. Both events were thought catalysts of sister Jessica's infamous reactionary elopement with Communist cousin Esmond Romilly, nephew of Winston Churchill.)

Yet most Mitford buffs read outside their favourite sister, drawing comparisons, cross-referencing the sources of this highborn sibling rivalry. Jessica Mitford's 1960 autobiography Hons and Rebels I found confirmative of Nancy's fictional Mitford/Radlett family portraits. Similarly with the priceless 2010 memoir Wait for Me! of Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, friend of the Kennedy's and restorer of historic Chatsworth House. Then I read Diana.

Whilst I find Nancy's playful sophistication the most entertaining, with Deborah's warm recollections the most easily digested, Diana is surely the most articulate, her intensity sometimes hard going perhaps due to her more studious genres – she never wrote fiction and her 'portraits' of high-profile loved ones have a distinctly more scholarly tone than any other Mitford memoirist.

To dub her a widely read intellectual firebrand, cultured beyond words, would be gross understatements – she was formidable. In equal measures too, charming, witty, audacious, at times teasingly funny. This intoxicating mix makes her prose irresistible.

Having moved to France a post-war pariah with husband Mosely, the couple established publishing company Euphorion Books. There Diana translated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's two-part magnum opus Faust.

Other Euphorion publications under her aegis included La Princesse de Clèves et autres romans (translated by sister Nancy Mitford, 1950) and Hans-Ulrich Rudel's memoir Stuka Pilot. She also edited several of her husband's books

In 1965 she wrote the regular column 'Letters from Paris' for the Tatler. She edited fascist cultural magazine The European for six years, contributing her own articles, book reviews and diary entries.

She specialised in reviewing autobiographies, biographies and the occasional novel, with commentary of her own experience of the subject, for The Daily Mail, The Times, The Sunday Times and Books & Bookmen.

She was the lead literary reviewer for the London Evening Standard during A.N. Wilson's tenure as literary editor (he called her the 'most beautiful, most intelligent, and most beguiling of the celebrated Mitford sisters.') The Standard resumed publication of her book reviews from 2001 until her death in 2003.

She wrote the foreword and introduction of 1975 biography Nancy Mitford by aesthete and family friend Harold Acton (on whom Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder character Anthony Blanche was based).

In 2007 The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters was published, a compilation including many to and from Diana, edited by her daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley.

Diana's own books included: A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography (1977), The Duchess of Windsor and Other Friends (1980) and her memoir Loved Ones: Pen Portraits (1985). From these she built a considerable fan base.

Strangers with the worst preconceptions, on meeting her liked her despite themselves. Called 'effortlessly charming' by all, from early acquaintances, to wartime Home Office interrogators, to late millennium media interviewees, she was loved by each Mitford sister of whichever ideological bent.

Many held blind to her dazzle, unable to reconcile her old association with the Nazi regime, never dropping her old moniker 'the most hated woman in England'. But in a 2001 letter to sister Deborah, she maintained: 'Being hated means absolutely nothing to me, as you know.'

Some people are simply more than their politics, Diana Mitford Mosley a pure gold example. I was spellbound by this collection of her writings.

My review of Lilian Pizzichini's The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

by 

Lilian Pizzichini

My rating 4 out of 5 stars

A thoughtful friend overseas bought and posted this book to me, unaware of my having read it twice – once after buying it before giving it away, the second on loan from my library. Without hesitation on rereading the life of my favourite author, I became immersed a third time.

Lilian Pizzichini draws much from Carole Angier's Jean Rhys: Life and Work (1990), producing a more condensed product. Her other main primary source is Rhys' Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979).

This piece focuses on Jean the person, without the extensive theoretical commentary on her literary technique that so protracts Angier's earlier biography to its 792 printed pages. (The Blue Hour contains basic coverage of Rhys' writing but in a comparatively slender 336 printed pages.)

Indeed, Pizzichini's word economy and 'instinct for form' (among Rhys' own key trademarks) make this biography also a stylistic tribute to Rhys.

On all three readings I was struck by its leaning towards the commentariat's judgmental take on Rhys the dysfunctional woman. Though this seems inescapable, documenting such a broken character, Rhys' staunchest fans would applaud volubly if someone, someday, wrote more sympathetically, less condescendingly, showing a more strident alliance with this unique literary voice.

Admittedly, Pizzichini doesn't go as far in this respect as Carole Angier, who even concludes with a second-hand posthumous diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. She touches, like Angier, on Rhys' positive character traits, while gesturally rationalising Rhys' dysfunctional side.

Yet I found myself leaping to Rhys' defense at each derisive inference. If still here to comment for herself, Jean would almost certainly call all of her biographers 'smug', 'respectable' and 'sneerers'.

Despite those personal issues I remained hooked by this biography. Where it triumphs over Angier's is in its pace and concision - for those seeking a faster, shorter read, that is. It makes no pretense of supplanting Angier's more fleshed-out 1990 study, still the undisputed definitive model for Rhys aficionados.

Like Rhys' prose, The Blue Hour is captivating, poignant and in parts exhilarating. Though an often patchy echo of Rhys and Angier combined, Pizzichini's work is slickly executed, sticking to factual historic elements, avoiding dry academic commentary and styled in the tradition of its subject: Jean Rhys. Hence my four stars.

Overall, nothing could give me greater pleasure than reading about this extraordinary woman, of whose life and works I have read far less engaging accounts than this.

Absolutely worth a read by any Rhys fan.

My review of Laura Thompson's Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford

Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford 

by Laura Thompson

My rating 4 out 5 stars

I sought out this biography after reading Laura Thompson's Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. Thompson's work on the famous Mitfords is engaging, entertaining and informative.

Though Nancy was not initially the most famous Mitford (Unity, Diana Mitford Mosley and Jessica Mitford having already attained notoriety with their subversive political antics and men), it was she who later secured the Mitford family myth with her bestselling novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, both (very) loosely based on her family and each still global classics.

As the eldest child of 2nd Baron Redesdale (16 years older than youngest sister Deborah Mitford), she was a prominent socialite long before becoming a famous writer.

Despite her aristocratic, if rather penniless, beginnings, Nancy was the only Mitford sister besides Jessica Mitford, to attain vocational financial independence, the other surviving sisters marrying lucratively regardless of their various individual talents.

Nancy's later books, after the more frivolous fiction that brought her fame, were historical biographies. These were penned during her Paris years - a staunch Francophile, she made that country her home, first in Paris and later in Versailles.

She was also a notorious tease, both to loved ones and the wider world, causing national furore with her tongue-in-cheek commentary on 'U and Non-U' phraseology in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy, which claimed certain terminology defined a person's class. England missed the joke and bit the bait, but Nancy was above it, across the channel in her adopted homeland.

The most socialist of the sisters, the funniest and most stylish, Nancy had a well documented sting in her tail and was perhaps secretly the saddest to reach old age (Unity, who died young, being the most straight forwardly tragic), never settling with a truly devoted husband or partner and long hurt by unrequited adoration for the love of her life, politician Gaston Palewski, the close associate of President Charles de Gaulle.

She suffered a lonely painful death from cancer in 1973, just a year after the French government made her a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur and the British government appointed her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Whilst much of Laura Thompson's material here is recycled from Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters and much of it generalised Nancy Mitford 'stock' fare from the wide canon of work on her, Thompson's clear fondness for her subject gives it tremendous readability.

I read this book in a just few nights and will no doubt reread it far into the future, Nancy Mitford being one of my all time favourite personalities.