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

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Summary: And you think YOUR siblings are a problem!
Comment: The Mitford clan was the epitome of old English gentry and minor aristocracy. The father of the
sisters who are the subject of this book, DAVID MITFORD, 2nd Baron Redesdale, was related to Winston
Churchill. Their mother, SYDNEY BOWLES MITFORD, came from a distinguished family.
/>NANCY (1904-1973) was the oldest and became a hugely successful writer of satirical fiction that
poked savage fun at her own family and class.

PAMELA (1907-1994) was the most "normal"
of the lot. She married and divorced a scientist, and was content to live quietly in the country.

DIANA (1910-2003) was one of the two most controversial sisters. Beautiful and
charming, she was the muse of several artists in her teens, and married the heir to the Guinness
brewing fortune when she was 18. She left him four years and two babies later and ran off with Sir
Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and the most hated man in England. They
remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, which made her the most hated woman in
England. They were imprisoned for more than three years during the war but never wavered in their
commitment to both fascism and each other.

UNITY VALKYRIE (1914-1948), known as "Boud"
or "Bobo" to her sisters, was by far the most controversial sister. A striking Valkyrie-esque
beauty, Unity, who was conceived during her parents' sojourn in the unfortunately-named town of
Swastika, Canada, lived up to her karma by becoming obsessed with Nazism while in her teens. She
managed to meet Hitler and become obsessed with her new friend and proudly wore her Hitler-signed
swastika badge everywhere. When England and Germany declared war, she tried to commit suicide, but
botched the job, shooting herself in the head but not killing herself. Incontinent and childlike,
she lived in the care of her mother for another ten years.

JESSICA (1917-1996) "Decca"
was probably the best-known of the sisters to American audiences. At the age of 18, already a
committed Communist, she ran off with her black-sheep cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of
Churchill's, to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After the British sent a battleship to fetch her
home, the young Romillys went to the US where they tried to make a living as writers and bar-tenders
before Esmond enlisted in the Canadian army. He was killed on a mission over the North Sea. Decca
found a job with the American Communist party, moved to Oakland, remarried, had another child, and
wrote several muck-raking books, of which "The American Way of Death" is the best known. The success
of her books enabled her to leave her job with the Party, with which she had become disenchanted as
the stories of Stalin's wretched excesses spread, but she remained a radical until she died. />
DEBORAH (1920 -2004) Raised alone by her eccentric parents after her sibs had left the
home, "Debo" was the mediator between her warring family, in which some one was always on
"non-speakers" with someone else. Debo married Andrew Cavendish, second son of the Duke of
Devonshire, whose older son and heir to the title, Billy, had married JFK's sister Kathleen. Billy
died in the war a few months later and as soon as it was established that Kathleen wasn't pregnant,
the title passed to Andrew, making Debo the Duchess. They inherited Cavendish, a huge estate, along
with other properties, and she lived quietly there until her death, turning the estate into one of
the major tourist attractions in England.

OK, that's the cast. There was also a son,
but he gets short shrift, compared to his amazing sisters.

The book itself: The 22
chapters, ranging from 1894 to 2000, trace, in somewhat diminishing degrees of detail, the lives of
this eccentric gang. The footnotes alone run to 46 pages. Lovell had free access to family papers
and letters. There is also a 4-page bibliography and a 26-page index. There are also three sections
of photographs.

The only complaint I have is that there is no real explanation of the
forces that drove three of the sisters to commit their lives, in the face of overwhelming opposition
and adversity, to the three most oppressive, repressive, and totalitarian forms of dictatorship
known. We get a hint about Decca, who seems to have reacted in a knee-jerk way to Diana's
involvement with Mosley and his Fascism and, at the behest of Esmond Romilly, comes to see her
family as not only the symbol of all that is evil in the world, but also as the literal, actual
cause of it. But Decca's eye-opening occurred before she met him, and that's the puzzle. And what
drove Unity to immerse herself in Nazism? We never learn. Diana's commitment to Fascism is a little
easier to understand. As the deb and then bride of the year, she lived an incredibly wealthy,
social, and shallow life, and it wasn't until she met the dashing Mosley that she ever gave a
thought to politics. So for her to follow the man she loved into the belly of a hated belief system
isn't too surprising. She may have initially embraced fascism for the sake of Mosley and their
relationship - understandable, if regrettable - but her steadfast commitment to it, which lasted
until her death in 2003, is harder to comprehend.

Whether or not you agree with the
beliefs they held, this was a fascinating group of people and the author does an excellent job of
bringing them to believable life.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A Good Familial Portrait of the Wacky Mitford Family
Comment: I first read Jessica Mitford's "A Fine Old Conflict" when it was published in the early 1970's. It
remained in my bookcase and I recently re-read it and also read "Hons (Daughters) and Rebels" which
whetted my appetite for more information on what the sisters came to label as the "Mitford
Industry". I then purchased "The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family".

I was not
disappointed. I found The "Sisters" really enjoyable and well researched, and the photos excellent.
There is much interesting information in the many footnotes, too.

Like Sydney said, "What a
Set!"

Customer Rating:

Summary: A Fascinating, Riveting Book
Comment: "The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family" tells the (true) story of the Mitford sisters, six
beautiful and talented aristocratic young women who came of age in the interwar period.(There was a
brother Tom who died during WWII. He does not play a major role in this book nor does it seem in
their lives.)

These women lived, for the most part, amazing (though not admirable in all cases)
lives: Nancy, the oldest, became a best selling novelist; Pamela, the "least interesting" (to the
biographer and her family, though not necessarily the reader), lived a country life after a marriage
to a brilliant man who married compulsively (six total); Diana, the society beauty, who left her
husband for the fascist Oswald Mosley and who befriended Hitler; Unity, who became obsessed with
Hitler and met him 140 times during a short period before WWII; Jessica, the rebel, who eloped at
18, became a communist, moved to the states, and became a best selling author on such topis as the
funeral home industry; and Deborah, the youngest, who made the most brilliant marriage, to the
future Duke of Devonshire.

This book details the eccentric but loving childhood of these sisters
(though the father had murderous rages that seemed to have a lifelong impact on the children) and
the diverse set of political causes and men that both brought them together and drove them apart
over the years. Any book that affords the reader glimpses of Churchill as an uncle, Hitler as a
"friend", Maya Angelou as an honorary "sister", is worth its price. Lovell presents her material in
a straightforward manner. The book is thoroughly researched.

However, there are flaws. Lovell
could probe further than she does into the psyches of the sisters. Three of them became obsessed
with men in ways that bordered on the unhealthy and bizarre (Nancy had a lifelong infatuation for a
count that would never marry her, the beautiful Diana dedicated her life to the unfaithful Mosley,
and Unity's fixation on Hitler was downright psychotic.) And she lets Diana off the hook a bit too
easily for her fascist and pro-Hitler views (Diana never repented.) She seems somewhat bewitched by
Diana's external beauty-she met her at the age of 90--and doesn't focuse on the fact that it was
external. (As obituary writers did this past summer after her death in August.)
Still it is a
great read particularly for those fascinated by the British upper classes between the two wars.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A Very Flawed Masterpiece
Comment: To begin, the author has done an outstanding job of research, compilation, and organization. Quite
a balancing act with multiple subjects, and the author has superbly achieved her feat. This said,
the biography has too many serious flaws for it to be given the rave notices of most reviewers. I'm
afraid most readers are too enchanted by the fascinating lives of these highly unusual women and,
thus,have not critically approached the book. The author has provided us with a literary tea
party with her subjects, but other than the superficial facts of their lives, she has provided us
with only an elementary analysis or understanding of who and what they were, and more importantly,
how and why they got that way. Perhaps a more thorough grounding in psychology could have benefited
the writer in her profession. The unique characters of David and Sydney Mitford are the key to
understanding their daughters. Both of them had troubled emotional lives that were fully transfered
genetically and environmentally to their offspring. Sydney lost her mother at a very young age and
emotionally "shut down" for the rest of her life. A paragon of virtue, totally devoted to her
family, she was like a dead-pan, sonombalant iceberg. It must have been maddening to these six
girls to have such an outwardly unfeeling, unaffectionate mother. Imagine how it must have felt to
know that nothing you did, even threatening suicide by jumping off the manor roof, could ever do
more than raise a polite and tranquil eyebrow of your mother and elicit only a supremely detached
and blaise reaction. And the father - even as a boy it seems apparent that he had mental problems -
just not eccentricity - but blind rages that alienated him from his boyhood family. As a father,
David deeply loved his children but completely undermined them by his relentless volcanic fits of
rage. His good side was his sharp, sarcastic humor which amused his children, but sadly taught them
that it was the only acceptable vehicle for expressing their emotions. Thus, the four famous
daughters adopted a sharp-tongued pose to hide their damaged emotions. There's way too much of
these things to go into at any depth here. Suffice it to say, the author failed to give her
subjects the psychological analysis and understanding that they were screaming for their entire
lives. She also failed to give an objective view of the British caste system and way of life that
helped create their attitudes, such as the emotional sterile childhoods of he upper classes that
necessitates the life-long use of childish nicknames. Nicknames are almost a sub-theme of the book,
but the author fails to note their importance in both helping to keep the users securely attached to
their meager childhoods with their nannies in the nursery and also to perpetuate the upper class
eliteness of having a private club with secret passwords - you know you belong because you use the
ridiculous childhood nickname - thus today you could not be more upper class than if you referred to
Her Majesty the Queen as "Lillibet". As for the technical, a good editor is screamed for here.
The author has no gift for sentence construction or the usage of words. She loves introducing a
sentence with a dependant clause that has nothing to do with the subject of the sentence. It is so
often confusing and irritating - the reader has to skip back a few sentences to see what she's
referring to. An example: "Indulging in these constant volcanic eruptions with loud shouts and
dangerously flashing blue eyes, the house was not a pleasant place to be." Now, where's the editor?
It's absurd that an author be allowed to drop or confuse her subject noun literally dozens of times
in a book. And the sloppy choice of pronouns is also confusing and sometimes disastrous. When five
or six women are previously mentioned by name, and then the author proceeds to refer back to one of
them with the "she" pronoun, you have to almost disect the paragraph to figure out which she is
being referred to. Like I said, a great researcher this author certainly is - a great organizer -
but a very untalented writer, and, alas, a very mediocre biographer who lacks the skills of critical
analysis and intellectual understanding to give these fascinating subjects the presentation that
they truly deserve. But a worthy attempt. Once again, WHERE WAS THE COPY EDITOR?!

Customer Rating:

Summary: Definitely Worth Reading !
Comment: This is a standard biography, i.e. it starts at the very beginning, lays the groundwork for an
understanding of the Mitford sisters' social class and era, then proceeds through to the present,
where only two sisters remain alive. If you're looking for deconstructionism, you won't find it
here -- Lovell approaches her subjects with apparent objectivity. In fact, she refutes many
criticisms offered by earlier biographers, such as the widely-held assumption that Unity Mitford was
Hitler's mistress.

At the same time, Lovell is clear that the family's friendliness toward (and
Unity and Diana's unabashed embrace of) Naziism is more than politically incorrect seen from the
standpoint of today. Lovell filled in many gaps in my knowledge about the life of the upper class in
Britain in the pre- and WWII period, making it easier to understand what has always seemed to me to
be the naivete of their politics . . .such as the mother continuing to insist that "Hitler was a
personable, charming and thoroughly nice man" based on a few pre-war social engagements.

I love
the comment from one British peer (and friend of Jack) that, during his tenure as president, Kennedy
did for sex what Eisenhower did for golf.

The book moves quickly through less interesting details.
It leaves one with a strong picture of the life of this amazingly diverse family -- and a better
understanding of their class and the era in which they lived.

I recommend this book highly to
biography-lovers and WWII buffs.

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