The Mitford Girls - Mary S. Lovell

I’ve been doing a lot of book reviews recently. It’s quite ironic that I’ve been doing more since I finished all my modules than I did when I was actually supposed to be reading a book a week.

The book I have just finished I actually started last summer – just before I went back to Uni. As term started and I had more and more things to do I had to stop reading it, and I just picked it up again a couple of weeks ago. It’s a biography of the Mitford Sisters: Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca and Debo. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them – they were very famous at the time, especially between 1930 and 1950 – but quite a few of them wrote novels, so you may have read them.
In case you don’t know who they are, here’s a brief summary:

1. Nancy Mitford

Nancy was the oldest and although she had a disastrous love life, she had an immensely successful career. She wrote a large number of books including The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing, as well as various biographies.

2. Pamela Mitford

Pam (nicknamed The Woman, for some reason) was perhaps the least well-known Mitford, and lived a very quiet life.

3. Diana Mitford

Diana was officially named Britain’s Most Hated Woman during the Second World War because she and her husband Oswald Mosely were friends with Adolf Hitler. They were also Fascists, like Hitler, and this made the British public scared for the safety of their democracy. She was imprisoned in horrific conditions for three years, forbidden to see her children or family.

4. Unity Mitford

Unity was as much a Fascist as Diana, and she was enamoured by Hitler. She lived in Germany for a good few years and made very good friends with him. However, she really didn’t want there to be a war between England and Germany, and when war was declared in 1939 she tried to kill herself by shooting herself in the head. She did not succeed and was permanently brain-damaged, resulting in her premature death.

5. Jessica Mitford

Jessica (more commonly known as Decca) liked to call herself the Black Sheep of the family, because she was staunchly Communist and ran away from home when she was a teenager to fight in the Spanish Civil War. She married her cousin Esmond and the two moved to America, but he died in WWII. She was very active within the American Communist party, and later the Civil Rights movement, and later in her life she wrote a series of controversial non-fiction books including The America Way of Death. She wrote an autobiography called Hons and Rebels which is also very famous.

6. Deborah Mitford

Debo was the youngest of the sisters and was the one who tried hardest to keep the peace between the sisters throughout the years. They were a very argumentative group, and she was one of the few who tried to maintain happiness. She married the Duke of Devonshire and was instrumental in resurrecting Chatsworth House, one of the most renowned houses in the country, and she still lives there now.

The Mitford Girls is a biography of them all, and is absolutely fascinating. I’d read some books by Nancy before, and I’d heard of Decca because she’s JK Rowling’s idol, and JK Rowling’s my idol, so I know way too much about her.

The biographer Mary Lovell has written it incredibly well, and manages to flow between the narratives of all the sisters impeccably. You can hardly tell where one story ends and the next one starts, it’s that deft. She has evidently thoroughly researched it, and all the extracts from letters make it really enjoyable to read. It doesn’t feel like a biography or a non-fiction book: it feels like a story. Even though there are a lot of politics discussed between the 30s and 40s which it would help a little to know about beforehand, it really doesn’t detract from the understanding.

I feel like I’ve learnt a lot from reading it, and although I don’t read biographies very often and thought this would be fairly challenging, I felt as though I breezed through it. If you have any interest in any one of these women or the period of time they inhabited, then I highly recommend reading this book!