Genealogy Books - The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

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Customer Rating:

Summary: You've read this before
Comment: If you've read even one book about the Mitford family, you've read this book before. It relies
heavily on Jessica Mitford's HONS AND REBELS, and/or THE HOUSE OF MITFORD, by Jonathan & Catherine
Guinness, and Nancy Mitford's comedies. The author merely borrows fact (or fictionalized fact) and
conclusions from all other authors, and sets them forth yet again, in this waste-of-time effort.

I wanted NEW insights into this family, and all I found was repetition. While I
appreciate a biographer who allows me to draw my own conclusions, there should be times when an
author's feelings come forward about the subject(s). We should have some sense of where the author
stands, in other words. In this case, I think the author was too concerned about not causing
offense to the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Mosley, who gave her assistance. There is absolutely
nothing fresh about this multi-biography.

Very disappointed in this, and very glad I
only borrowed it from the library.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other
Comment: Mary Lovell's interesting book on the Mitford sisters (and on Tom, the ill-fated brother) is a
guilty pleasure indeed. Lovell has a completely new take on things that urges us to find Diana
Mosley a brave 20th century heroine who fought for what she believed in and whose imprisonment
during the first part of World War II was a shocking act of injustice comparable to the internment
of Japanese-Americans in prison camps in the USA. Revisionist much? Yes, indeed, and that's part
of its fascination. Lovell seems most determined to set on its ear David Pryce-Jones' biography of
Unity Mitford. Unity, the tortured British Nazi who set her cap on the biggest Nazi of them all,
Adolf Hitler, here emerges as the funniest and cutest of all the funny and cute sisters. Yes,
Lovell admits, she should not have laughed when Hitler boasted of forcing a party of Jews to cut a
sward of German lawn with their teeth alone--that was cruel and unMitfordlike. But outside of that,
did Unity really do any actual harm? Lovell says no.

Meanwhile there is a continual
hum of approval for Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, and her substantial work keeping together her
husband's ancestral estates. For Lovell, preservation work of a zillionaire's estate merits the
highest commendation.

Decca (Jessica) Mitford, comes off the worst, and her elopement
with Spanish Civil War buff, and her first cousin, Edmond Romilly, shows how unfeeling she was to
her mother and father, and she stayed a Communist for years and years (until 1958) when she should
have abjured the party years ago. Well, she should never have joined up in the first place. />
Many reviewers praise Lovell's evenhandedness and lack of judgement, but I haven't seen a
trace of an even hand. In one telling passage Decca is stuck overnight in an Alabama church with
Martin Luther King Jr, while Ku Klux Klan and 1,500 other white protestors surround the church with
tear gas. "The uproar," Lovell writes, "had been caused by the surprise appearance at the event of
the Freedom Fighters, a sort of flying squad pf black youths on motorcycles, who were much feared
by whites in the Southern states." Oh so that's why it happened, eh? Why not just say, "The uproar
has been caused by racism"? That's shorter and much more on point than your ridiculous "Freedom
Fighter" excuse.

Debo and Pam aren't in the book that much, and Pam is like the
invisible woman. When she goes gay ("she's become a you-know-what-bian," Decca writes to her
husband) Lovell makes absolutely no comment, though she analyzes every little variation on the
Mitfords' uncountable family nicknames. It's obviously not important to her, but it leaves the
reader thinking, well, Pam is really a bore, which is terribly unfair to Pam (she whom her sisters
called, "Woman," for she was the best of all of them) who deserves a biography of her own, one in
which the biographer didn't wish her away with a "well done, Pam" from time to time.
/>That said, the book is like a big box of delicious candy and you just can't stop eating it till
all of the sisters die (but one) and we are left contemplating the terrible, wonderful legacy of an
aristocracy who could do whatever they pleased and managed to get it wrong 95 per cent of the time,
empty candy wrappers scattering in the breeze. I loved it, pretty much.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Interesting Read
Comment: I loved the way the author achieved combining the personal lives of the Mitford family and the
history of the times. In hindsight, it's easy to say that Diana and Unity should have been smarter
about Hitler. But it was a time when he almost had a whole continent enamored with his achievement
shown by the economic advances of Germany. No one in the free world acted on the atrocities that
happened on his watch because these acts were incomprehensible at the time..so how could the two
Mitford sisters, Diana and Unity even anticipate the horrors that he was finally associated with.
They were attracted to the glamour, the power, the popularity and intelligence they believed Hitler
had. Were they wrong?? Yes...but at the time it seemed like he was the rescuer, and I thought that
Lovell was very fair portraying the situation..never revealing her feelings about this. It was a
beautifully researched book which presented the sisters and family as very real..even Tom, who was
absent during the time doinng his wartime duty, but portrayed as a very influentuial and loved
character in the family. I thoroughly enjoyed this book..I became very attached to all of the
sisters for different reasons..and I loved Sydney and thought she imparted a great sense of
confidence for her girls to develop their independent selves..

Customer Rating:

Summary: There'll always be an England
Comment: The Mitfords were an aristocratic but not very wealthy English family. The family was so dominated
in the early 20th century by six sisters that it's easy to overlook that there was also a son among
the siblings. Perhaps it was the upper class rural isolation in which the children were raised that
made several of them so headstrong, eccentric, and well over the top.

A biographer
just couldn't make up this material. We have a Hitler-loving Nazi sympathizer, a Communist freedom
fighter, a talented novelist, a sister who leaves her husband to marry the leader of the British
fascist party, and a duchess.

The lives of several sisters are played out in public
view, and the British press couldn't get enough of the pretty Mitford girls. The surprise is that
one or two of the children have led reasonably "normal" lives.

The poor father, the
publicity-shy Lord Redesdale, is overwhelmed by his children's behavior and spends a lot of time in
the Canadian wilderness digging for gold.

The family story is told with the cooperation
of the last surviving sister, Deborah, who became the Duchess of Devonshire. The author respected
Deborah's wish that the author be reasonably respectful of the family members.

This
restriction has a beneficial effect on the telling of the story. The book is devoid of cheap shots
and amateur psychoanalysis. The facts themselves are sensational enough.

But the
author is also prevented by this constraint from delving into the character of the father, Lord
Redesdale. The facts related in the story suggest to this amateur psychoanalyst that in addition to
being an eccentric, he was somewhat unbalanced.

Anyone who has been mortified by their
own eccentric and embarassing family will enjoy seeing that it could be worse.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Not that interesting
Comment: Yes, these sisters are all rich and/or famous, but I found it very hard to care. Maybe because I
found them boring. I'm too old to care about Paris Hilton and too young to find the era these
sisters lived in very interesting.

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