Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels. NYRB Classics pb [publishing details page missing in my library copy]. First published 1960.

I’m still recuperating from my knee operation shortly before Christmas, so my activity here has been stalled.

I recently posted about Mary S. Lovell’s rather gushing biography of The Mitford Girls (link HERE), and Jessica Fellowes’ implausible deployment of this notorious family’s home background as the setting for the first of her ‘Mitford Murders’ series (link HERE). Several of the sisters held famously extreme political views: Unity adored Hitler and attempted suicide when WWII broke out; Diana married the fascist leader Oswald Mosley; other members of the family mostly admired, openly or tacitly, the fascist cause.

Except for Jessica , the ‘red sheep’, who ran off in her late teens to Spain with her cousin Esmond Romilly (a nephew of Winston Churchill) to join the fight against Franco’s fascists in the civil war there, and became an ardent supporter of the communist party when they migrated to America.

Hons and Rebels is her idiosyncratic autobiography, mostly about her earlier life, where she gives her own account of her upbringing in the privileged world of Bright Young Things while living in the environment of her minor-aristocracy parents – who disapproved of educating girls. This Victorian mindset of the upper classes severely restricted the opportunities for these spirited young women; it’s not surprising that most of them chose to rebel (hence the title of this book) and reject those antiquated values.

There’s not much revealed here that isn’t in the Lovell account, so I shall simply give a few quotations that I think speak for themselves in what they show about Jessica’s complicated character and beliefs.

Here is a fairly typical passage about her attitudes to class and class differences. She’s describing the bus ride to Rotherhithe (in what was then the deprived dockland area of southeast London) from ‘more familiar parts of London (Kensington, Hyde Park, Oxford Street)’ – that is, the smarter, posher West End:

It winds past miles and miles of workers’ flats with such incongruous-sounding names as Devon Mansions, Cornwall Homes. Nine or ten stories [sic – this is an American edition] high, these gloomy red brick structures house a shorter and paler race of people than the inhabitants of London’s West End. In appearance, dress and speech they differ so radically as to give the impression of a different ethnic group [p. 172].

Hm. The reasons for this difference go unexplored. She outwardly supports the radical left in their struggle to improve workers’ rights and lives, but her reasons aren’t entirely altruistic, as such passages tend to illustrate. She describes her fellow women workers when she had a job in America as a market researcher with undisguised repugnance, saying she’s ‘repelled’ by them.

The most revealing passage about her convictions comes near the end when she’s reflecting on her own and Esmond’s characters and beliefs, and she starts to show a little more self-awareness. She says they’d have dismissed any suggestion that ‘anything in our conduct was remotely attributable either to heredity or upbringing’:

…for, like most people, we regarded ourselves as “self-made”, free agents in every respect, the products of our own actions and decisions. Yet our style of behavior during much of our life together, the strong streak of delinquency which I found so attractive in Esmond and which struck such a responsive chord in me, his carefree intransigence, even his supreme self-confidence – a feeling of being able to walk unscathed through any flame – are not hard to trace to an English upper class ancestry and upbringing.

The qualities of patience, modesty, forbearance and natural self-discipline that the worker brings to his struggle for a better life, the instinctive respect for the fundamental dignity of every other human being – even his enemy – so often displayed by the Negro or the Jew in his own fight for equality, were on the whole conspicuously lacking in us, or only present in the most undeveloped form [pp. 279-80].

She goes on to imply that their passionate espousal of the communist cause lacked the high-minded idealism and well-intentioned motivation or principles of most of the others in that cause, who were ready to make any sacrifice. Instead, it was more that she and Esmond had:

…a number of old scores to settle along the way. Too much security as children, coupled with too much discipline imposed on us from above by force or threat of force, had developed in us a high degree of wickedness, a sort of extension of childhood naughtiness. We not only egged each other on to ever greater baiting and acts of outrage against the class we had left, but delighted in matching wits with the world generally; in fact, it was our way of life.

Yet Esmond, towards the end of his life, she adds, had ‘completely outgrown the violence and automatic rebellion against authority of his adolescence, had replaced these qualities with a most serious devotion to the cause which to him was an all-important goal…the defeat of fascism.’

She doesn’t say whether she also experienced this kind of conversion. She did continue participating in left-wing activism (including the civil rights movement) for the rest of her life (although she left the communist party in 1960), and this cost her any chance of proper reconciliation with her family. It seems likely, therefore, that she did.

Esmond joined the Canadian air force when WWII broke out, and died in action at the age of 23. Jessica mentions this in a single footnote three pages from the end of the book – it was clearly too painful for her to say anything further about him.