As I write this, my desk is stacked high with remnants of “the Mitford industry”, as Decca Mitford referred to it with scorn. I have been collecting them since I was a teenager, the way football fans collect programmes, and with news this week that Deborah (or Debo, as she was nicknamed by her nickname-loving family) Mitford, the youngest and last surviving member of the family had died, I’ve been rereading them all.
There are the biographies and collected letters, starting with my personal favourite, Mary S Lovell’s The Mitford Girls, as well as those written and edited by the family’s friends and relatives, some with predictably glamorous surnames (Waugh, Guinness); some with predictably ominous ones (Mosley). But most of all, there are the books by the women themselves: Decca Mitford’s autobiography, Hons and Rebels; Diana Mitford’s A Life of Contrasts; Deborah Mitford’s titled, charmingly, Wait for Me! Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister; and Nancy Mitford’s glittering novels, From Highland Fling to Don’t Tell Alfred, via The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.
So yes, I am one of those people who loves both to read about the Mitfords and to read the Mitfords. This is probably a hopelessly non-U habit of mine, but being a hopelessly middle-class American, everything about me is non-U. But I hadn’t realised until relatively late in my obsession how other fellow non-U-ers frowned on it too. “You’ve got a posh crush, I see,” one journalist sniffed at me, on spotting a Mitford book sticking out of my bag.
DJ Taylor summed up the Mitfords as “witty remarks and textbook flippancy [underpinned by] an absolute and obdurate self-belief”. In a review of a collection of letters between the sisters, Andrew O’Hagan, one of the best critics and writers living, described their style as mere “posh aesthetic”: “The posh aesthetic appeals to people who want life’s profundities to scatter on the wind like handfuls of confetti,” he wrote in the London Review of Books. Liking the Mitfords, I realised, was seen as something girlish, shallow and immature, like having an over-developed fondness for ponies, or wanting to be a ballerina. And this, in all honesty, amazed me, and still does.
The Mitfords were posh: of that there is no doubt. Their parents, David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, were Lord and Lady Redesdale, rich in land but not in cash, and when it comes to English aristocracy, you can’t get more posh than that. To read the names that run like beads through the sisters’ biographies is like reciting a rosary of the early 20th-century British upper class: Curzon, Cooper, Churchill, Cunard, Strachey, Beaton. This is part of what Taylor describes as the “Mitford chic”, and it is how they’ve long been packaged and sold.
Their particular brand of upper class snobbery is now so anachronistic it’s simply amusing: in an obituary this week of Deborah, the writer pointed to a list of the late Duchess of Devonshire’s dislikes, which included but was not limited to “the bits of paper that fall out of magazines; female weather forecasters; the words ‘environment’, ‘conservation’ and ‘leisure’; supercilious assistants at makeup counters; dietary fads; skimmed milk; girls with slouching shoulders and Tony Blair.”
And then there are the Nazis. Of the seven Mitford children – Nancy, Pamela, Tom, Diana, Unity (“Bobo”), Decca and Debo – most had met Hitler and one, Unity, had an intensely close relationship with him and signed off her letters, in classic Mitford style, “Heil Hitler! Love, Bobo”. Unity is probably the ultimate example of nominative determinism, having been conceived in Swastika, Ontario, and given the middle name Valkyrie at birth. Diana fell passionately in love with Oswald Mosley and the two married in Goebbels’ drawing room, with Hitler as a guest. At the other end of the scale, Decca ran away as soon as she could and became a committed communist.
As a middle-class American – and Jewish, to boot – I should be repulsed by the Mitfords. That I’m not is because they collectively represent something much greater than their (fascinating) biographical details. For a while I thought it might be “posh-crushing”, and so read books about other aristocratic families. I couldn’t finish a single one, they were all utterly deadly.
It astounds me that anyone could dismiss the Mitford mentality as simply a “posh aesthetic”, because their writing is so much more layered than that. Yes, Nancy’s two most famous novels are witty, but they are underpinned by great hooks of self-awareness and sadness that snag on the lightness. “Keeping up a good shop-front” was the aim in the face of the enormous personal tragedies suffered by the whole family.
Even though Nancy wrote The Pursuit of Love at the height of her love affair with Gaston Palewski, even she couldn’t envisage a happy ending for them and killed her alter ego, Linda (but in classic Nancy fashion, she also killed Linda’s lover too.) And she was right: Palewski would eventually devastate her by marrying someone else, and she died soon after. One can only maintain the shop-front for so long.
But the Mitfords represent more than glamour and tragedy. To me, and I suspect to a lot of other women (for it is mainly women) whom they fascinate, they remain an exciting reminder of a woman’s ability to shape her own life, for better or worse, uncowed by familial and social expectations and restrictions.
Decca fell out with most of her family due to her political beliefs; David’s heart was broken by Diana’s marriage and Unity’s antics, and his and Sydney’s marriage was eventually destroyed by the strain of it all. But each of the girls pursued their own wildly different paths, whatever the personal cost.
Decca went from being a pampered, uneducated aristocratic child to a fierce civil rights campaigner in the US; Diana remained unapologetically devoted to Mosley to the day he died; Nancy lived a somewhat lonely life in Paris, writing novels. How many of us can say that we pursued such individualistic lives, utterly unshaped by our parents and unlike our siblings?
If they were all fascists, or novelists, or communists, there would be of no interest. The fascination comes from the unapologetic differences. So it might sound odd to say this about a family spiced with such bitter ingredients as Hitler and loss, but what the Mitford sisters represent is courage and freedom.
