Only an indulgent listener (someone who owes me money) would stick around to hear everything I've learned about the Mitford family. After reading the books listed below and watching some clips from the BBC, I can do a bad imitation of David, Lord Redesdale ("Stinks to merry hell." "I grabbed the doctor and shook him like a rat!"). More important, I can trace Lord Redesdale's daughters through 20th-century history like silk threads through a debutante's gown. A tug on those threads and you draw Evelyn Waugh near to Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud to Cindy Lauper, Joseph Goebbels to Maya Angelou. Forget six steps of separation: one Mitford, Diana, will get you from Winston Churchill's dining room to a fireside chat with Adolf Hitler in under a decade.

But most people barely have patience for my shorthand descriptions of the Mitford girls themselves, who are fascinatingly unlike each other, and yet oh so hard to keep straight. They include

Nancy, the novelist, whose semi-autobiographical fiction made the family famous.

Diana, the society beauty, who left her rich husband to marry Sir Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, in the Goebbels' living room.

Unity, the Nazi-lover, who stalked Hitler until she became part of his inner circle and then shot herself in the head when England declared war on Germany.

And Jessica, who did what any nice communist does to get away from her fascist siblings: she eloped with Churchill's nephew, made her way to America, and found steady work in a New Deal agency. A natural writer and muckraker, Jessica Mitford became an icon of the American Left. Her memoirs Hons and Rebels and A Fine Old Conflict linked the Mitford universe of debutantes and Bright Young Things to the American Civil Rights movement and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

In addition to the famous four, there were three Mitfords who rarely made the gossip columns: one brother, Tom, who died in the war, and two non-political sisters, Pamela and Deborah. Deborah, the youngest, became the Duchess of Devonshire and helped preserve her husband's family estate, Chatsworth, from the architectural murder of the post-war years. At 92, the Dowager Duchess is the last living Mitford sibling. When sly reporters ask her what it was like to have tea with Hitler, or how she stayed friends with her fascist sisters (without growing horns and a tail), she explains that she's never had the slightest interest in politics and that she simply loved her family, fascists and communists alike, as people. She adds that she's always voted conservative because she believes so strongly in conserving things. Including, obviously, family affection.

But actually, the Mitfords all adored each other—even when they were storming through Hyde Park in opposite directions; even when they were writing satirical novels about family members or dashing off letters of denunciation. Love plagued them. In 1974, Jessica Mitford refused to meet her sister Diana, explaining in a letter to Deborah that "having adored her through childhood it makes it ten times more difficult to have just casual meetings." As for the fact that Jessica herself had once asked Winston Churchill publicly to send Diana back in prison, lest the British government show "an absolute betrayal of all those who had given their lives in the war"—well, that probably didn't help the comfort level, either.

It's their besetting love through the trials of politics that makes the Mitfords so interesting, so ancient and yet modern, as if warring Plantagenets or Tudors had woken up just after the Versailles Treaty, kissed each other fervently, and picked sides in the battle for the new Europe. The collection of their letters that got me hooked on them to begin with, The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, is more than 800 pages long and spans over 75 years of correspondence. Yet according to editor Charlotte Mosley (Diana's daughter-in-law), the selection represents only five percent of the existing letters, never mind those that were lost, thrown away, or burned in communist outrage. That's a lot of communication between people who sometimes went years as "non-speakers."

As with most sisters, the Mitfords began love-hating each other in childhood. They spent their early years tucked away at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire. Lord and Lady Redesdale shipped brother Tom off to Eton at the usual unthinkable age, but the sisters stayed at home with nannies and governesses and lived like earlier generations of upper-class English girls, trotting to church each Sunday with various creatures at their sides (Jessica had a pet sheep, Unity a snake). Most of them described hours of boredom in childhood but also pranks and contests of wits with their father at the dinner table; according to Deborah, when David Mitford joined battle with Nancy there was no stage entertainment to compare. The girls' mother, Sydney, was a health nut whose beliefs about the salutary capacities of "the Good Body" were fodder for her children's jokes. But Sydney Mitford was also sensible, funny, and tolerant of other people's unorthodox choices. It was a quality her daughters particularly appreciated after politics had all but blown the family apart.

The younger sisters all looked up to Nancy, who terrorized them with the brittle wit that made her books bestsellers. But they adored Diana, the loveliest and most maternal of the older three. In her Hons and Rebels, Jessica describes Diana as the perfect sister, "the one who patiently tried to teach me to ride …. [D]ay after day she patiently picked me up from my spills in the stubble field. 'Do try to hang on this time darling. You know how cross Muv will be if you break your arm again.' " Diana herself said that as a young girl she literally worshiped her little sisters; but she also longed for a wider world, and she was barely "out" at eighteen before accepting a marriage proposal from Brian Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Guinnesses held court over a wide London social and literary scene. This was the age of the Brideshead set and fading Bloomsbury gods. Through Nancy, Diana came to know Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman well; Paul César Helleu painted her portrait (as did Churchill, whose wife was a cousin of David Mitford), Cecil Beaton photographed her, and Lytton Strachey made her a confidante. The diarist James Lee-Milne described Diana in her youth as "a goddess. More immaculate, more perfect, more celestial than Botticelli's seaborne Venus."

But in 1932, the "goddess" left her wealthy husband for a powerful politician, Oswald Mosley, who had formed the British Union of Fascists that same year. Diana was a political creature by nature, and she saw Mosley as Britain's savior—a strong man who could bypass the sloppiness of democracy, shore up the Empire, and hold back the communists. Most British found Mosley simply alarming: he proposed totalitarian government for England with a lightning-bolt symbol in lieu of a swastika. Unable to find enough support on the island, he was soon asking Hitler for permission to broadcast his message from German territory.

Diana scandalized her parents by taking up with Mosley and then hauling her younger sister Unity to a Nazi party conference in Nuremburg. This was one of several fact-finding missions Diana undertook on Mosley's behalf: she admired the economic transformation the Nazis had accomplished in Germany, and (mysteriously) she found them personally charming (Jessica recalls calling Julius Streicher a "beastly filthy butcher," and Diana responding with wide blue eyes, "But darling, Streicher's a kitten!"). For Unity, the trip to Nuremberg might have been a visit to Lourdes. Back at home, she took to wearing a swastika pin and giving the "Heil Hitler!" salute to shopkeepers. By 1934, Unity was living in Munich, trailing Hitler from one café to another like a Nazi Magdalene. One day at the Osteria Bavaria the Fuhrer called her to his table, and soon she (lucky girl!) became a fixture in his entourage, meeting him, according to Charlotte Mosley, more than 100 times over five years.

To explain what happened next, it's important to know that Jessica at this time loved Unity better than anyone in the family. After years of being shut up with Deborah in the schoolroom, "ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post" (in Jessica's words), she and Unity were so close that they shared a made-up language and continued to write affectionate letters long after Unity began referring to Hitler as "He" with a capital "H." But Jessica loathed intolerance and cruelty. A convinced communist at 19, she blazed up at accounts of fascist crimes in Germany and Spain. She watched in horror as two of her sisters—then her sensible parents—came under the spell of fascist madmen. She even had a dream of visiting Unity in Munich in order to meet Hitler; once face to face with the Fuhrer, she would whip out a gun and shoot him at close range. "I often bitterly regretted my lack of courage," she said, and those weren't idle words. Most of the family met Hitler socially at some point before the war; his bodyguards wouldn't have given a cherub-cheeked teenager a second glance.

In early 1937, Jessica ran away from home. She duped her parents into thinking she was visiting friends in Dieppe and then hooked up with her rebellious second cousin Esmond Romilly for a series of romantic adventures that veered between comedy and tragedy: a trip to Spain to fight Franco; a hasty wedding back in England; a voyage to America where they survived by bartending in Miami and selling silk stockings in New York; finally Esmond's brave service and tragic death in the Royal Canadian Air Force. When Winston Churchill arrived in Washington for his first wartime planning sessions with Roosevelt, he called Jessica to the White House to tell her in person that Esmond's plane was definitely lost in the North Sea. It was an awkward, painful meeting—the aging prime minister in his peacock blue nightshirt and the young mother weeping with a baby in her lap. Fumbling for words, Churchill brought up Diana.

By then, Diana's life had also fallen apart; she and Mosley had been separated from their young children and, over Churchill's own wishes, sent to Holloway Prison under Rule 18B. The government had nothing concrete to charge them with but reasoned that if Hitler invaded Britain, he might appoint Mosley as a "fascist overlord." Churchill pitied Diana, and he wanted to comfort Jessica by describing what he'd done to make prison conditions tolerable for her sister.

He had misjudged Jessica. According to Mary S. Lovell, she "exclaimed hotly that Diana and Mosley should be put up against a wall and shot." Of the many people Jessica blamed for the war and for Esmond's death (every fascist everywhere), it was Diana whose crimes seemed most monstrous. Jessica saw fascism early on as most people see it now: cruelty enshrined in law, a system that no sane person could support. How could you reconcile with family members who had befriended Hitler? Of course, Diana's Hitler-crush had been mild compared to Unity's, but Jessica seemed to consider Unity as more victim than villain, especially after her bungled suicide attempt and resultant brain-damage.

Diana for her part was no more forgiving. Her nature was loyal, but loyalty had to be requited, and disloyalty disgusted her. When she learned that her little sister had written a public letter demanding her continued confinement, Diana felt a sting of personal betrayal that never subsided. She didn't lash out publicly, but over the years her bitterness leaked into letters to their mutual confidante, Deborah; she made snide, passive-aggressive comments about Jessica's Jewish second husband, or her daughter's relationship with a black man, or inaccuracies in her memoirs. Other wounds healed as World War II receded into history, but Jessica and Diana lived the rest of their lives in a Cold War of conscious, painful opposition. A brief thaw occurred in 1973 when Nancy was dying; they put politics aside in order to sit at their sister's bedside. The meeting was pleasant, and Jessica felt the deep pull of a childhood affection—"rather agony," she told Deborah. It was never repeated.

It's interesting that the one philosophical view Diana and Jessica shared was hostility to religion. Raised in the Church of England, they both found Anglican hope thin and dull next to the earthly utopias they dedicated their lives to—Diana's aristocracy of the brilliant and beautiful and Jessica's brotherhood of all in a socialist democracy. They derided religious people generally, and the fact that the nanny they both loved more than their own mother in childhood was a devout Christian apparently made little impression on either of them; only Deborah mentioned it in her memoir. As far as their little sister went, Jessica and Diana drank constantly at the waters of Deborah's tolerance and graciousness—both writing letters to her throughout their lives, sharing their troubles, taking her loyalty for granted—but they never peered too deeply into her waters. Which is to say, they never seemed to ask themselves what kind of self-abnegation that kind of graciousness would demand, or why the effort might be worth it.

By the last quarter of a raucous century, Jessica had given up the Communist Party and spent most of her time writing and fighting for a fair society. She remained a fixture of the "old left" (or "just leftover" she said), but her influence was mainly among socially conscious artists and intellectuals. Maya Angelou called her a "sister," Hillary Clinton and Christopher Hitchens paid homage; J. K. Rowling named her as the biggest influence on her writing (it's easy to see echoes of Hons and Rebels all through Harry Potter, especially in the relationships among the Black sisters).

Meanwhile, the Mosleys mellowed. Sir Oswald went on a reputation-rejuvenation tour in the late '70s, sounding so sane in an interview with William F. Buckley that it was hard to imagine how much he'd once resembled Dick Dastardly. Diana admitted in a letter to Deborah that Hitler had been a "terrible part" of history; on a radio program, Desert Island Discs, she called his crimes against the Jews "immoral"—a meager word for the murder of six million, but it wasn't in Diana's nature to court public favor by disavowing old allies: she preferred public opprobrium to disloyalty. The thing was, the British no longer had room for someone who couldn't bring herself to say the obvious: "Hitler was evil and we were idiots."

Diana wrote once more to Jessica, in 1996, when she heard her little sister was dying of cancer; that letter is unfortunately lost. But we do have Jessica's letter to Deborah in December of 1980, upon reading of Oswald Mosley's death (she and Deborah called each other "Henderson" because of the hens they had raised as girls).

Dearest Hen,

En route from Los Angeles to Arkansas I read in L.A. paper that Sir O. Mosley had died. Diana must be so incredibly sad & lonely. For obvious reasons I shan't be writing but if inclined do transmit message of sympathy.

Much love, Henderson

Oh dear what a v. odd & awkward letter. But you know how it is, Hen.

Maybe given enough time the sisters would have forgiven each other fully. Then again, maybe a few odd, kind words were as close to reconciliation as an unrepentant fascist and a stubbornly idealistic communist could ever have managed. Measured against the hell suffered by so many in pursuit of their respective heavens, a little sisterly awkwardness wasn't such a terrible price to pay.

Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and essays and teaches Latin in Alabama.

A Mitford Selection:

The Sisters: Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley

Hons and Rebels, by Jessica Mitford

The Pursuit of Laughter, by Diana Mosley

Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford

Wait for Me!, by Deborah Mitford

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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