Growing up, I never had a sister, but I always wanted one—or many. Reading alone in my room, I imagined myself into tight-knit literary sororities: the Bennets, the Marches, the Dashwoods. These packs had their problems—petty squabbles, broken confidences, burnt hair—but I envied their intimacy and loyalty. It was the gang first, the world second. Beyond the precincts of fiction, of course, the world has a way of meddling with such bonds. There is perhaps no better example than the Mitford sisters, the six daughters of one of England’s most peculiar aristocratic families, whose radically divergent lives—two became fascists, one became a communist, one became a model aristocrat, one wrote novels skewering the bourgeoisie, and one retreated into cultivated solitude—have riveted the public for more than a century. I first learned about the family in college, when I encountered “Hons and Rebels,” a memoir by Jessica (Decca) Mitford, the second youngest of the group. Written in arch, inhalable prose, it begins as a story about the joy of having sisters and ends with the deep pain of losing them to irreconcilable differences. It was the first book that left me grateful to be my parents’ only daughter.
The Mitford sisters, born between 1904 and 1920, grew up in a cloistered environment that, had it not existed, would seem the stuff of fairy tales. Their father, David Freeman-Mitford, or Lord Redesdale, was a Conservative British peer who was an intermittently successful Army man before settling into his inherited land in the Cotswolds. His wife, Sydney Bowles, or Lady Redesdale, was the pampered daughter of the media baron Thomas Gibson Bowles, who, among other ventures, founded Vanity Fair. The couple shared a social class and a smug distrust of anyone outside it. Owing to fluctuating finances, the family moved several times during the children’s early years: first to a grand house in Batsford, then to a less grand home in Asthall, and then to an isolated country estate in Swinbrook, where Decca set much of the action of “Hons and Rebels.”
Life at Swinbrook, Decca wrote, was akin to living inside a “fortress or citadel of medieval times.” Lord Redesdale was an avowed xenophobe who was wary of strangers, and his wife was happy to follow his lead. The Mitford girls were prohibited from attending school—they were meant to be sparkling society wives, and so were given lessons at home, supervised by a collection of insufferable governesses. Locked away in a dull, remote part of the country, the sisters were forced to entertain themselves. They invented nonsense languages and private jokes—their taunting banter came to be known as the “Mitford tease”—and became one another’s most passionate obsessions. “We were as though caught in a timeproofed corner of the world, foster children, if not exactly of silence, at least of slow time,” Decca wrote. “The very landscape, cluttered up with history, was disconcertingly filled with evidence of the changelessness of things.”
Change, of course, came rapidly to England in the twenties and thirties, and the Mitfords, sequestered though they were, eventually encountered the forces swirling outside the gates. Nancy, the eldest, smartest, and most acerbic sister, partied with the Bright Young Things in London before becoming a famous novelist whose best-known books were cutting parodies of the upper-class milieu. Pamela, the second oldest, was a gentle bumpkin who, after marrying and divorcing a millionaire physicist, spent around twenty years living in seclusion with her female “companion,” an equestrian named Giuditta Tommasi. Diana, the great beauty of the family, married an heir to the Guinness brewing fortune and left him for Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, whom she wed at the home of Joseph Goebbels. Next came Unity—conceived, portentously, in the small Canadian town of Swastika—who, outdoing her sister, developed a girlhood crush on Hitler and moved to Germany to serve the Nazis. Decca went in the opposite direction: she was a self-identified socialist by the time she was fifteen, and later, in America, became a muckraking journalist. The youngest and most elegant Mitford, Deborah, steered largely clear of global affairs and became a duchess. (The only Mitford son, Tom, died in the Second World War.)
