Mary S. Lovell, The Mitford Girls: the biography of an extraordinary family. Abacus pb. 2002; first published 2001. 611 pp.
Why are the Mitford sisters, subject of this biography by Mary S. Lovell, so famous (and notorious)? In many ways they were just a typical example of the privileged minor provincial British aristocracy, not particularly endowed with any special qualities. Lovell doesn’t really provide clear answers: she’s too enamoured of her subject.
I don’t need to give much information here about them; there’s a good account on Wikipedia. Here’s a potted version.
David, second baron Redesdale (the irascible xenophobe Uncle Matthew in Nancy’s novels) married Sydney Bowles (not sure if she’s related to the present queen) in 1904 and had six children:
Nancy (1904-73): biographer and novelist of, among others, The Pursuit of Love (1945), Love in a Cold Climate (1949), and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960) which I described in a post here as ‘frothy and insubstantial’ (same with The Pursuit of Love); ‘snobbery and casual racism distasteful’ – especially Uncle Matthew’s loathing of all things foreign and foreigners. She was vaguely socialist.
Pamela (1907-94): didn’t do much of note. John Betjeman was in love with her, for some reason.
Thomas (1909-45): fascist sympathiser. Refused to fight the Germans in WWII; died fighting the Japanese in Burma.
Diana (1910-2003, died two years after this book was published, so the author might have been wary of upsetting her). Had an affair with the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, and married him in 1936. Evelyn Waugh was in love with her for a time. His novel Vile Bodies is loosely based on the Mitfords’ upper-class social circle.
Unity Valkyrie (1914-48; parents were Wagner fans; she was conceived in her father’s quixotic Canadian gold-seeking venture in a town called, appropriately, Swastika): ardent fascist who adored Hitler, stalked him and became close to him. Shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, survived, but with brain damage.
Jessica (known as Decca, 1917-96): communist, lived much of her adult life in America. Also a writer.
Deborah (1920-2014): married the future duke of Devonshire and ran the enormous stately home Chatsworth House (oddly enough it’s in Derbyshire).
Unity, Diana and Jessica/Decca are the most notorious sisters for their extreme political views and allegiances. What was the nature of Unity’s relationship with her adored Hitler? Lovell concedes that she was in love with him, but concludes that there’s no evidence there was ever a ‘sexual element’. Just an infatuated girl who made a bad choice, it seems.
Diana was another frequent visitor to Nazi Germany before the war and also developed an intimate relationship with Hitler. This is Lovell’s gushing comment on all this: ‘Diana is good company, as were all the Mitfords: it can have been no hardship for Hitler to spend time with a sophisticated and beautiful woman who happened to share his taste in art and music.’ So nothing much to disapprove of there, then. Lovell even quotes, clearly thinking this is amusing, the sisters’ mother saying in ‘exasperation’: ‘Oh, why do all my daughters fall for dictators?’
There were fierce loyalties and fissures in the sisters’ relationships. Fascist Diana (and husband Mosley) was interned in Holloway Prison 1940-43 under wartime regulations after being denounced by Nancy. Diana and her politically opposed sister Decca didn’t speak for decades.
This is an entertaining account, but it’s hard to ignore the awfulness and banality of several of the Mitford sisters. Lovell’s account is full of references to their charm, beauty, wittiness and elegance, but she presents the fascist sympathies of several of the siblings and their mother with a lot of sugar coating that I found distasteful and offensive. It’s more of a hagiography than a biography.
One example of their so-called wit: Nancy was particularly noted for her sharp wit: she was known in the family at the Queen of Teases:
She seemed to know exactly what would irritate her victims most, fastening on any insecurities with devastatingly accurate effect…One friend likened her humour to the barbed hook hidden beneath a riot of colourful feathers in a fishing fly…there was often a cruel element to her teasing, which caused real distress…But despite her cruel streak, Nancy’s sheer funniness endeared her to everyone, even when they were the butt of painful tease, for she went to great lengths to make them laugh.
The usual retort of the bully: can’t you take a joke? It’s only a bit of banter. No, this is repellent and inexcusable, and Lovell should have known better than to present this tendency shared by most of the Mitford family as charmingly amusing. The same goes for their father David’s fiery temper, intolerance and racism, as I noted above in my quotation from my post on his portrayal as Uncle Matthew in Nancy’s novels.
Jessica Fellowes, niece of Julian (the Downton Abbey creator and writer of the screenplay of the film ‘Gosford Park’) has written a sequence of six mystery novels based on the Mitford family. I’d be interested to know if anyone reading this has read any of them and what they thought of them.
Oh, lord, I tried to read this book a year ago or so. I finally gave up and threw it in the trash. Literally. This is something I never do. Any book I don’t want to keep is donated. But this one annoyed me so much I couldn’t in good conscience inflict it on anyone else.
Hagiography is the right word. I couldn’t believe how much the author loved these awful women. Jessica was the only halfway decent one. She wrote “The American Way of Death,” which is a classic look at the US funeral industry. Nancy’s books, which I’ve read, are more fictionalized memoirs. I was surprised reading stories about the family that the were almost verbatim related in the novels…which were actually rather boring.
Glad to see you hate this book, too!
Lovell clearly adores these awful people, and assumes her readers will too. I agree, Jessica was the only one who avoided being a monster.
Mr. Lavery, For starters, I’ve enjoyed your reviews for years. An American critic once called Mary Lovell’s book on the sisters “injudicious.” and you’d probably agree. For my part, I think it allowed to reader to make up his or her mind. (More on this later.) I did see a factual error. It wasn’t Unity who was put in Holloway prison during the early ’40s but Diana herself. Oswald Mosley was in the male ward and later allowed to join her. Unity, after surviving her suicide attempt, was more or less out of it and living with her mother. Howard Lee Levine, Washington DC.
Thanks for pointing out the error – I’ll correct it. Unity and Diana sort of merge in my thinking of them – both avid Nazis. I didn’t try to cover all the details of the siblings’ relationships- Diana’s marriage to a Guinness heir, for example, before taking up with Mosley the Blackshirt.
The problem with these Mitfords being so famous is that readers like me who wouldn’t otherwise have given them the time of day, get lured into reading Nancy’s, books, when really, there are so many books more worthy of our time.
Good point, Lisa. Lovell is too dazzled by the superficial glamour of the sisters to give an objective account of their limitations.
Interesting how the sisters captured their time so much in there various lives I did read the letters years ago and often spend time in and around chatsworth as it is just up the road from me
There’s a lot of material in this biography taken directly from the sisters’ letters – they were prodigious correspondents. I’ve not been to Chatsworth, but it looks imposing in pictures I’ve seen. I visited the Derbyshire hills many years ago: lovely part of the country.
I could add that Deborah Devonshire (Debo) was certainly no fascist or Nazi. She married for love, whatever bumps there may have been along the way, and she showed an admirable work ethic in the running of Chatsworth. How not to like a woman who could publish a book of recipes in 2004 where the opening sentence read “I haven’t cooked since the war.”
I didn’t have space to linger on every one of the sisters, and you’re quite right, Howard, Debo wasn’t as awful as some of her sisters. Decca also experienced a fair amount of grief and hardship in her life, and at least tried to do something for others, not just for herself and family.
Love that quote!
I think the long term fascination comes partly from their being at a time that is greatly romanticised, the clothes, houses, servants, cars, parties and travel etc. and also because they’re a group that stay together through letters and writing for their whole lives, so there’s a lot of information. The media gives cycles of the Pursuit of Love or something without ever really looking at the family; the fascist politics, racism and snobbery is all packaged as ‘great fun’. Their enduring appeal is something I think about every now and then!
Jane: you’re right, but much of that romanticised view of the ‘bright young things’ of the thirties overlooks the sinister tendency to be swayed by extremist and populist-nationalist politics. I tried to avoid inverted snobbery in my post, but find it hard to ignore the complacent acceptance of privilege in the family, eg when supposedly living in comparative poverty on a Scottish island, the Mitford mother, Sydney, had her groceries shipped up from Harrods! Underpaid, overworked servants were routinely taken for granted. Not their fault, of course, but still…Might have been great fun for them, most of the time (though Diana had it tough in prison – deservedly so, many would say).
Lordy, thank you for reading this so I don’t have to. Fortunately, I’ve never been able to make it through a Mitford book, and this one sounds insufferable. Why *are* people so fascinated by them – well, the author here obviously is, but she doesn’t explain why. As for the Fellowes books, well I wouldn’t touch those with a bargepole either – I’m not that impressed by her uncle and I suspect these might be cut from the same cloth!
Simply telling us repeatedly how charming, clever and humorous these sisters and their family were just doesn’t hold up when she then tells us some of the awful things they said, wrote and did. Does a monster who happens to be ‘charismatic’ or ‘eccentric’ therefore escape censure or criticism – and that would include some of the idols of Unity and Diana here like Hitler and his henchmen. I’ve never got on with the Downton Abbey genre, either; peeking behind the scenes of posh rich people behaving badly isn’t my idea of interesting.
I did read and enjoy this a decade or so ago, but for the letters and stuff reproduced and the basics, and yes, she doesn’t exactly take a firm view on them being either fascists or vile or both. Debo and Decca, as other people have mentioned, were the OK ones, and I’ve read other books about them which were more critical of the right-wing side of the family.
Not all of the family were reprehensible, but Lovell is far too dazzled by the superficial glamour to give an objective account. Not just of the sisters, but also the parents. The mother was another fascist sympathiser, while Lord R was a bully and bigot who refused to let girls go to school (waste of money) and insisted on keeping windows open in their bedrooms at night, even in winter (good for their health). He clearly had some kind of mental health problem as a consequence of the trauma of his WWI experience- but Lovell presents his behaviour as mostly charmingly eccentric. It’s a shame that all of these shortcomings prevented me from appreciating some of the more interesting aspects of the sisters’ characters and achievements.
I read one of Nancy’s books many years but didn’t understand what all the fuss what about – I just thought it was mean-spirited and now, your description of Nancy here makes me understand why. I won’t bother to try anymore – life is too short for a book/author that doesn’t work for you!
Nancy does seem to have had a cruel nature – and as you say a mean spirit. At least Lovell doesn’t omit this aspect of her character, but her admiration of her writing, and of the family as a whole, is hard to fathom. I’ve just read one of those Jessica Fellowes murder mysteries set against the backdrop of the Mitford family house – post forthcoming.
Loved your review, particularly as I’ve always been very immune to Mitford mania (full disclosure — I did read and enjoy Love in a Cold Climate & The Pursuit of Love but I was very, very young at the time!). Like many of your commenters here, I’ve never really understood their appeal.
That’s what was so galling about the author’s position: dazzled by the superficial glamour and too soft on the casual fascism, xenophobia, etc. I wasn’t over impressed by Nancy’s novels; her cruel streak shone through