The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters
by Charlotte Mosley (Editor)
My rating 5 out of 5 stars
'I also think a volume of
letters will have to wait until everyone's dead, don't you, because of hurt
feelings?' Diana to Deborah, 17 August 1980.
Such was this potential 834 page
can of worms, comprising just an estimated five per cent of the sisters'
letters, yet effectively telling six interrelated life stories: the daughters
of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale and his wife Sydney Bowles
(Sydney's father founded English Vanity Fair and The
Lady magazines, employing son-in-law David to manage The Lady).
The Mitford saga lends credence to the adage
'truth is stranger than fiction'. You couldn't invent such tales. Hardly a week
went by in the 1930s without one of this sextet making headlines.
The opening letters, from 24
July 1925, show the interwar halcyon years, the English country lives of the
Mitford girls. Mainly home-educated by governesses, most are well read thanks
to their grandfather Algernon
Freeman-Mitford's legacy which included a
stately family library.
Debutante of 1922 and Bright
Young Thing Nancy is 20, flitting to and from her London and Oxford social
scenes. Pamela is 17, Diana 15, Unity 10 and Jessica 7. Little Deborah is just
2, her first letters not appearing here until she approaches her tenth birthday
in 1930.
To subsidise her father's tight allowance, Nancy
starts writing, encouraged by literary amigo Evelyn Waugh. Initially uncredited in society gossip columns, she then sells signed
articles, until in 1930 The Lady gives her a regular column
(presumably helped by family connections). She soon attempts novels, basing
characters on relatives, friends and acquaintances.
If Nancy's literary enterprise is a gamble, her
love life is a fiasco. She is soon ditched after a futile lengthy engagement to
effeminate gay aesthete Hamish St Clair Erskine, four years her junior, second
son of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn and ex-lover of her brother Tom. On the rebound,
she is engaged to erratic Peter Rodd, second son of Sir Rennell Rodd the
soon-to-be ennobled Baron Rennell. The marriage will become largely a sham.
But Nancy's exploits are eclipsed by the younger
Diana, who in 1929 wins over her naysaying parents and marries brewing
heir Bryan
Guinness who will inherit the barony of Moyne. Such a
great society beauty is she that family friend James
Lees-Milne calls her 'the nearest thing to Botticelli's
Venus that I have ever seen'. Evelyn Waugh dedicates his novel Vile
Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to Diana and
Bryan. Her portrait gets painted by Augustus
John, Pavel
Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb.
Diana triggers scandal in 1932 by leaving her
husband for British Union of Fascists (BUF) head Sir
Oswald Mosley. As Mosley does not intend leaving his wife
'Cimmie' (Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of
India) Diana lives in a flat as his mistress, until in 1933 Cimmie dies of
peritonitis.
With Unity along for the ride, Diana then
ingratiates herself with Adolph
Hitler's circle on Mosley's covert bidding for a
commercial radio station on German soil to fund Mosley's BUF. In 1936 Diana and
Mosley secretly marry in Joseph Goebbels' Berlin house, with Hitler a guest.
Unity is meanwhile swept away, a Hitler devotee and Third Reich fanatic, basing
herself in Germany much of the time.
In 1937 teenage Jessica, the 'red sheep' of the
family, having long saved to run away, elopes to Spain with second cousin Esmond
Romilly, Communist nephew of Winston
S Churchill. Romilly finds work reporting for the News
Chronicle and, after legal obstacles caused by their parents'
opposition, they marry and move to London, in the poor industrial East End.
On 20 December 1937 Jessica has a baby, Julia,
who dies the following May in a measles epidemic. In 1939 Jessica and Esmond
emigrate to the USA. When WWII starts Esmond enlists in the Royal Canadian Air
Force, leaving Jessica in Washington D.C. carrying another daughter,
Constancia. After a bombing raid over Germany, Esmond goes missing in action on
30 November 1941.
Nancy meanwhile discovers in the summer of 1938
she is pregnant, but miscarries. In early 1939 she joins her husband Peter Rodd
in the South of France as a relief worker, assisting Spanish refugees fleeing
Franco's armies in the civil war. Soon afterwards Rodd, commissioned into the
Welsh Guards, departs overseas and Nancy, back in London, has her second
miscarriage.
The early war years are gruelling for all,
except maybe Pamela who always took life in her stride. She has married the
brilliant 'rampantly bisexual' scientist and heir to the News of the
World Derek Jackson (becoming the second of Jackson's six wives). From
around now too, relations between Jessica and Diana permanently freeze, their
political rift so deep it becomes personal.
On 29 June 1940 Diana, prised from eleven week
old Max Mosley, is interned without charge in Holloway Prison under Defense Regulation
18b, a dangerous person to the state, tagged 'England's most hated woman'. With
Mosley already interned separately in Brixton Prison, Diana pines for her
husband and four sons (two from each marriage). The couple reunite in Holloway
in December 1941, lodged in a flat on prison grounds, thanks to Mitford
cousin-in-law Prime Minister Winston
S Churchill. Both are released in November 1943, on grounds of
Mosley's ill health, and placed under house arrest until war's end at Mosley's
Crux Easton property in Berkshire.
Nancy's first four published novels, satirical
farces, have seen no great acclaim. Her husband fights overseas. She does war
work in London's blitz, first as an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) driver. Then at
a Paddington casualty depot, writing with indelible pencil on the foreheads of
the dead and dying. Then in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from
Dunkirk. Also helping refugees billeted at her parents' London house in Rutland
Gate, requisitioned to accommodate Polish Jews evacuated from Whitechapel. An
affair with Free French officer André Roy results in a third pregnancy. Nancy
again miscarries, with complications leading to a hysterectomy in November
1941. Convalescing, at a loose end she works as an assistant at Heywood Hill's Mayfair bookshop and literati hangout, becoming the shop's social
nucleus.
Unable to reconcile with war, Unity publicly
shoots herself in the head at Munich's Englischer Garten. She survives with
bullet lodged in brain. Hospitalised unconscious in Munich for weeks with
Hitler suppressing news coverage, she is 'missing' to her family in England.
After two months her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale hear from a clinic in
neutral Switzerland, where Hitler has had her sent. Transporting Unity home by
ambulance, Lady Redesdale becomes her carer. Permanently impaired with a mental
age of twelve, Unity is volatile and incontinent. This compounds the stress on
the Redesdales' marriage, caused by political differences. They permanently
separate.
Deborah at first helps with Unity, then after
marrying in 1941 roams England following in-training Cold Stream Guards husband
Andrew Cavendish, second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. By war's end she
has lost two babies, her only brother Tom, four best friends and two
brothers-in-law. Her husband has unexpectedly become heir to his father's
dukedom.
The post war years I found the most gripping.
Unity dies aged 33 from her lingering gunshot wound. Nancy enjoys a literary
breakthrough with The Pursuit of Love, gives up
on her unhappy marriage and moves to Paris to be near new love of her
life, Charles
de Gaulle's right hand man Gaston
Palewski. Bedecking herself in haute couture she becomes an
ardent Francophile, nicknamed by her sisters the 'French Lady Writer'.
Diana and Mosley, social pariahs through their
politics, move to France near to Nancy, becoming friends and neighbours of
fellow pariahs the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the abdicated King
Edward VIII and twice divorced Wallis
Simpson, whom he has married).
The 1950s are for me the centrepiece of this
epic, with the sisters at their peaks. Nancy's writing career soars while her
adoration of Palewski is never fully reciprocated, their coupling never
formalized. His diplomatic career and other romances leave Nancy in the
shadows, over years their relationship trickling to naught. Nancy's acerbic
wit, irresistibly funny, shields a tortured woman. Unrequited love, loneliness
and sisterly jealousy are thought her underlying issues. She also reveals
having felt unloved by her mother (a complaint shared by none of her sisters).
Deborah has become Duchess of Devonshire,
soon-to-be hostess of royalty and world leaders (she is also related to the
Kennedy's by marriage). She administers historic Chatsworth House, her
husband's 35,000-acre family seat which was institutionalized for WWII.
Planning to move in, she oversees its colossal restoration. She is also
Châtelaine of Bolton Abbey estate in Yorkshire and the Lismore Castle estate in
Ireland. She involves herself in local charities and functions, supervises
staff, shares her husband's interest in thoroughbred racehorses and breeds
Shetland ponies.
Jessica, war-widowed and remarried, could not be
more different. Renouncing her gentrified roots, she is a naturalized American
and Communist Party USA member, living in Oakland, California. In her 10
November 1951 letter to Deborah, who contemplates visiting, Jessica writes: 'We
lead an extremely non-duchessy life here. For instance, if you want to stay
with us you would have to sleep on a couch in the dining room, we don't have a
spare room here ...' Jessica becomes an American civil rights figure and bestselling
author as celebrated as Nancy. The older of her two little boys, Nicholas, is
killed in 1955 when hit by a bus. She never speaks of it. Mellowing, she
resigns from the Communist Party in 1958.
Pamela, teased fondly by her sisters who
nickname her 'Woman', shuns world affairs and keeps to country life. This is
reflected in Poet Laureate John
Betjeman's unpublished poem The Mitford Girls,
ending with a line about his favourite: 'Miss Pamela, most rural of them all'.
Living variously in England, Ireland and Switzerland, she is the least active
correspondent (perhaps mildly dyslexic, notes the editor), yet deliciously
dotty. Divorced with huge settlement, she sets up home with an Italian
horsewoman, her life companion. Never remarrying, she is thought to have become
'a you-know-what-bian' as Jessica writes to her husband in 1955 when first
visiting Europe with her American family.
The sisters' frail old father Lord Redesdale
dies in 1958. His estranged wife, their mother, soon follows. As the seasons
turn we witness the inevitable peaks and troughs, stumbling across some
heartrending tragedy, fabulous triumph or side-splitting gem.
Take for instance Nancy's shriek-worthy nickname
'Pygmy-Peep-a-toes' for five-foot two-inch Princess Margaret, who is constantly
in the headlines over her affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend and whose
open-toed shoes Nancy thinks vulgar.
Or Deborah's nickname 'Cake' for the Queen
Mother, given after a wedding where, on hearing the bride and groom are about
to cut the cake, QM exclaims 'Oh, the cake!' as if having never seen it happen
before.
Their drollery and regal 'Mitfordese' drawl
recurs throughout ('Do admit!' 'Do tell!' 'Please picture!')
As the 1960s and '70s unfold we see the sisters
age and face social revolution, while old grievances to one another fester.
These include: whether Jessica's memoir Hons and Rebels invents
episodes of their growing up years to match Nancy's fictionalized versions
in The Pursuit of Love; whether
their brother Tom, killed in WWII, was a Communist supporter, Nazi sympathizer
or neither; and Nancy's spitefulness.
Diana, Deborah and Jessica become grandmother's
(one of Jessica's two African American grandsons will later become legal
scholar and Professor of Law at Yale James
Forman Jr.).
In 1972 Nancy, in poor health, is made a
Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, and a Commander of the Order of the British
Empire (CBE). She is soon diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, dying on 30 June
1973 at home in France and cremated, her ashes buried in England alongside
sister Unity.
We now witness the remaining sisters forwarding each other's letters when ganging up against each other beneath the smiling
repartee. Later ones, after Nancy's agonizing death, betray simmering
resentments towards her and Jessica, the two who forged independent careers
rather than leaning on marriage for wealth.
This backstabbing of the self-made two is by the
most privileged two, Diana and Deborah, though Deborah is more Diana's sounding
board for the most part. As the only sister to remain consistently on speaking
terms with all the others, Deborah is the natural mediator, though this becomes
harder as her husband battles alcoholism.
As they further mature, we see their growth,
especially of Diana (once 'England's most hated woman'), essentially so kind
yet understandably tortured in rare moments. In exile with Mosley she has time
to ponder, more so after his 1980 death. She suffers from deafness. She writes
prolifically, memoirs, biographies, book reviews, translations and commentaries
on her heyday, ever remorseless of her pre-war connexions. In A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography she reiterates, 'I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston
[Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting.'
Only years after Nancy's death will Diana learn
from released classified files of Nancy's treacherous role in her wartime
internment. Nancy had 'informed' British Intelligence agency MI5 that Diana was
'a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and admirer of Hitler [who]
sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy in general.' She had
later made official behind-scenes noises to prevent Diana's release. Though
Jessica had also (from America) lobbied against Diana and Mosley's release, she
had not later feigned amity, unlike neighbourly Nancy whom Diana had devotedly
supported through her protracted terminal illness.
Towards the close of the 20th century two more
sisters leave us. Pamela, hospitalized after a fall, dies in London on 12 April
1994. Jessica dies in the USA of lung cancer, aged 78, on 22 July 1996, her
ashes scattered at sea. She is survived by her widower and two of her four
children. Her deep rift with Diana is never healed, their only brief contact
having been while politely visiting the dying Nancy.
The voices taper down to Diana and Deborah, the
only two left in the new millennium. The last published letter, from Deborah to
Diana, is dated 5 January 2002. When Diana dies in Paris in 2003, leaving no
sisters for Deborah to exchange letters with, there's a poignancy finishing
this enormous book.
Diana was described in a Daily Telegraph (16
August 2003) editorial, after her death, as an 'unrepentant Nazi and
effortlessly charming.' According to her Daily Telegraph obituary,
a diamond swastika was among her jewels.
She was survived by four sons: author Desmond
Guinness; Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne; Alexander
and Max Mosley. Her stepson, novelist Nicholas
Mosley, wrote a critical memoir of his father for which
Diana never forgave him. Two of Diana's grandchildren, Daphne and Tom Guinness,
and her great-granddaughter Jasmine Guinness, became models.
Deborah lived eleven more years, producing
published works from memoir to gardening to cookbooks, a whole series on
Chatsworth House. Made a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) for
her service to the Royal Collection Trust, she died widowed on 24 September
2014, aged 94. Her funeral was attended by family and friends, six hundred
staff, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. She is survived by
three of seven children, eight grandchildren (including model Stella Tennant)
and eighteen great-grandchildren.
We cannot pity this youngest, longest living and
most advantaged sister, who had such a good innings, yet she comes off as the
stalwart figure of the piece and enormously likeable.
Charlotte Mosley's masterful editing and
footnoting is a work of art, her generous chapter introductions setting the
scene for each period. There's an indispensable index of nicknames, of which
the Mitfords had so many, plus a helpful family tree and scholarly rear index.
One must concur with J.K. Rowling's comment on the front cover: 'The story of the Mitford sisters has
never been told as well as they tell it themselves.'
This is the ultimate Mitford fan ride.
