On September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, a young Englishwoman walked into Munich’s Englischer Garten, sat down on a bench, and pressed a pearl-handled pistol to her temple. The gun had been a gift from Adolf Hitler. She pulled the trigger. The bullet entered her skull but did not kill her.
Her name was Unity Mitford, daughter of a baron and one of six sisters who grew up in the quiet villages of the Cotswolds. By the time that bullet lodged in her brain, one sister had married a fascist in Joseph Goebbels’ drawing room, another had run away to fight for the communists in Spain, and a third was on the telephone to MI5, betraying her own siblings. This is the story of six sisters raised in the same English nursery who scattered to the farthest extremes of 20th-century politics. The Mitford sisters’ father, David Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, came home from the Western Front in 1918 with a limp, a loathing of foreigners, and no interest in the modern world.
He wanted dogs, fresh air, and silence. What he got was six daughters: Nancy in 1904, Pamela in 1907, Diana in 1910, Unity in 1914, Jessica in 1917, and Deborah in 1920. A son, Tom, was born in 1909. In their world, sons carried the title and the land.
Daughters were beautiful problems to be solved through marriage. Their mother, Sydney, ran the household with cool efficiency. She believed in fresh air and the absolute minimum of formal education. This conviction shaped everything that followed.
The Mitford girls were not sent to school at all. They were taught at home by a parade of governesses, each of whom lasted less time than the last. The girls tormented them relentlessly, hiding in cupboards, releasing pet snakes during French lessons, and staging elaborate mutinies. The family began at Batsford Park, a grand pile with 35 bedrooms and Japanese-style gardens.
Maintaining it cost a fortune the family did not have. David sold Batsford in 1919 and moved the family to Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire. Here, in the early 1920s, the six Mitford girls spent what all of them would later describe as the happiest years of their lives. Denied formal education and trapped in a beautiful rural isolation, they created a pressure cooker of intelligence, boredom, and ambition that would eventually blow apart.
Underneath the stairs at Asthall Manor, the children built a civilization they called the Hons Society. It was named after the courtesy title each daughter bore as a child of a baron. In this tiny linen cupboard, the sisters made laws, passed judgment, and invented a private language. Nancy, the eldest, was the presiding genius of cruelty.
She was sharp, funny, and merciless, teasing her younger sisters until they cried. She told Diana she had been found in the road and was not really a Mitford at all. Diana believed her for years. Nancy would eventually turn her family into celebrated comic fiction.
Pamela was the quiet one. She loved animals, farming, and the countryside. In a family of extremists, her moderation was its own form of rebellion. Diana was the beauty.
She had pale gold hair, enormous blue eyes, and a composure that made her seem older than her years. She read widely and carried a hunger for intensity that would lead her to the darkest dinner tables in Europe. Unity was the problem child. She grew to nearly six feet tall, was clumsy and loud, and possessed an absolute determination to be noticed.
She once took her pet rat to a formal luncheon. Her middle names were Valkyrie and Freeman. She had been conceived in Swastika, Ontario, a coincidence that delighted her as she grew older. Jessica positioned herself in opposition to everything her family represented.
She saved pennies in a drawer, her running-away fund, against the day she would escape. She argued politics at the dinner table with ferocity. Deborah, the youngest, watched it all with wide eyes and a talent for understatement. She was cheerful, practical, and would become the only one of the six to build something that lasted.
The Hons cupboard was a rehearsal. Each sister tried on her future self in that tiny space. In 1926, David sold Asthall and built a new house at Swinbrook. The children loathed it.
Nancy called it Swinebrook. The sisters felt imprisoned, and one by one they began to plot their escape. The house spent roughly £400 a year on governesses, while Tom was sent to Eton at around £200 per term. An eldest son needed connections that only the right school could provide.
That his daughters needed far more than marriage could offer never seems to have occurred to either parent. What the linen cupboard produced was six women of extraordinary force. Each one left that cupboard and entered the 20th century with the unshakable conviction that the rules did not apply to her. Nancy was presented at court in 1923.
She went out into London and discovered she was brilliantly, dangerously funny. She fell in with the Bright Young Things, the reckless circle of young aristocrats who drank too much and drove too fast. Evelyn Waugh was her friend. John Betjeman came to Swinbrook and fell hopelessly in love with her.
Her first novel appeared in 1931. It drew shamelessly on her family. Nancy had found her weapon. She could turn pain into comedy.
Diana’s escape was more dramatic. In 1928, at age 18, she married Brian Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune. Their wedding was the social event of the season. Diana had everything a young woman of her class could want.
She was bored within two years. In 1932, at a house party, Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley, the most charismatic and dangerous politician in Britain. Mosley was a serial philanderer who had just returned from Italy, where he studied Mussolini’s fascist state and decided to build one in England. Diana fell for him completely.
She left Brian Guinness, abandoned her two small sons, and walked away from one of the greatest fortunes in England to become the mistress of a married fascist. By 1933, the scattering was complete. Nancy was writing in London. Diana was living openly with Mosley.
Unity had discovered Hitler. Jessica was reading communist pamphlets and adding pennies to her running-away fund. Pamela was quietly farming. Six sisters who had shared a linen cupboard now occupied entirely different worlds.
In October 1932, Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists. The BUF attracted a following that peaked at roughly 50,000 members in 1934. For a brief alarming moment, it seemed as though Britain might follow Italy and Germany into the darkness. Diana traveled repeatedly to Germany, where she cultivated a personal relationship with Adolf Hitler.
On October 6, 1936, Diana Mitford married Oswald Mosley in Joseph Goebbels’s house in Berlin. Hitler was a guest and gave the couple a framed photograph of himself. The marriage was secret. Even David and Sydney did not know until afterward.
British security services were watching. MI5 had opened a file on Mosley. Diana’s name appeared in it almost immediately. An intelligence assessment described her in terms that cut through every polite euphemism.
She was, the file said, far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband. The analyst understood something many of Mosley’s supporters did not. Mosley was a showman. Diana was an ideologue.
Mosley wanted power. Diana wanted to reshape the world. David was appalled by Mosley but viewed it as bad manners. Sydney’s response was more troubling.
She visited Germany, met Hitler, and came home speaking of him with warmth. She found in Hitler a man who shared her beliefs in fresh air, vegetarianism, and the simple life. While Diana was building her life around Mosley and Hitler, her younger sister Unity was doing something far more extreme. Unity’s attachment to Hitler was not political.
It was personal and obsessive. Unity Mitford sat in a Munich restaurant day after day until Hitler finally noticed her. She arrived in Munich in the summer of 1934, ostensibly to learn German. Her real purpose was singular: she intended to meet Adolf Hitler.
She had no strategy beyond the blunt force of her own will. She simply went to the Osteria Bavaria, where Hitler was known to lunch, and sat there day after day. It took months. Hitler noticed the tall, striking English girl.
On February 9, 1935, he sent an aide to invite her to his table. Unity recorded the event in her diary. The diaries, discovered in 2024 in the attic of a relative’s house, revealed something historians had long suspected but could not prove. Unity met Hitler approximately 140 times over the next four years.
She marked each meeting in her diary, with especially significant ones recorded in red. The word she used most often to describe Hitler was “angel. ”
There is no evidence the relationship was sexual. What it appears to have been was something perhaps more disturbing.
Unity offered Hitler unconditional adoration. She was young, aristocratic, foreign, and utterly without guile. Hitler gave Unity access to the innermost circles of the Nazi elite. She attended the Nuremberg rallies as his personal guest.
She was given a flat in Munich reportedly confiscated from a Jewish family. Eva Braun referred to Unity with undisguised contempt. In 1935, Unity wrote a letter to Der Stürmer, the most violently antisemitic publication in Germany, praising the Nazi regime’s treatment of Jews. The letter was published and reported in the British press.
Her family was horrified. MI5 opened a file on Unity in 1934. British intelligence was less concerned with her personal devotion than with the possibility that she was being used as a channel of communication between the Nazi leadership and sympathetic elements in British society. David forbade Unity to return to Germany.
Unity ignored him. He threatened to cut off her allowance. Sydney overruled him. Unity went back to Munich.
By the summer of 1939, war was inevitable. Unity had told friends and family that if England and Germany went to war, she would kill herself. No one believed her. They should have.
While Diana sat in Goebbels’s parlor and Unity attended the Nuremberg rallies, Nancy picked up the telephone and rang British intelligence. By the late 1930s, Nancy was providing information to the security services about her own sisters. She told them about Diana’s visits to Germany and Unity’s relationship with Hitler. Nancy’s motivations were layered.
She was genuinely alarmed. She also harbored deep resentment toward Diana, the sister who was more beautiful and more admired. Betraying Diana to MI5 was at once an act of conscience and an act of revenge. While Nancy informed on her sisters, Jessica had run.
In 1937, at age 19, Jessica eloped with Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew and a self-declared communist who had fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. The reaction in England was extreme. A Royal Navy destroyer was dispatched to retrieve Jessica. She refused to come home.
She married Esmond in Bayonne, France in May 1937. Between Jessica’s elopement and the outbreak of war, the Mitford family existed in its most extraordinary configuration. Sydney and David’s marriage began to crack along the same ideological line that divided their daughters. By 1940, they were living apart.
On September 3, 1939, Neville Chamberlain’s voice on the wireless announced that Britain was at war with Germany. In Munich, Unity Mitford walked to the Englischer Garten, sat down, took out the pearl-handled pistol Adolf Hitler had given her, and shot herself in the head. The bullet entered her right temple. It lodged in her brain.
It did not kill her. They brought Unity home on a stretcher in January 1940. Hitler arranged her repatriation, transporting her through Switzerland. Sydney traveled to collect her daughter.
The bullet had destroyed portions of Unity’s brain responsible for higher reasoning, emotional regulation, and impulse control. She could walk but unsteadily. She could speak but in broken sentences. The tall, forceful young woman who had stalked Hitler across Munich was gone.
Deborah described Unity’s condition years later. Unity had huge eyes and matted hair. She was incontinent. She laughed at inappropriate moments.
She still spoke of Hitler with affection, but vaguely, as one might speak of a character in a dream. The bullet could not be safely removed. David and Sydney took Unity to Inch Kenneth, a remote island off the west coast of Scotland. David, who had raged against Unity’s politics, now devoted himself to her care.
Unity lived for nine more years. She died on May 30, 1948, of meningitis caused by swelling around the bullet. She was 33 years old. She was buried in the churchyard at Swinbrook.
The grave is simple. It bears her name, her dates, and nothing else. In 1940, Diana Mosley was locked in Holloway prison without charge under Defense Regulation 18B. She was arrested on June 29, 1940, eleven weeks after her husband.
She was 30 years old. Her youngest son was eleven weeks old. Diana bore imprisonment with composure. She did not complain.
She did not recant. The Mosleys were released in November 1943 on grounds of Oswald’s poor health and placed under house arrest. Their release prompted a protest rally and a petition with 20,000 signatures. While Diana served her sentence, Jessica was building a new life in America.
Esmond joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was killed in November 1941, shot down over the North Sea. He was 23. Jessica was devastated but not defeated. She moved to Oakland, California, where she married Robert Treuhaft, a labor lawyer and fellow communist.
She joined the Communist Party of the United States and became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. Tom Mitford died in Burma on March 30, 1945, just weeks before the war in Europe ended. He was 36. His death devastated every member of the family.
Tom had been the peacemaker. After Tom, the Mitfords were not a family in any functional sense. David died in 1958. Sydney died in 1963.
Deborah had expected to be terrifically poor. Then death duties handed her one of the largest estates in England and a tax bill that could destroy it. In 1941, Deborah married Lord Andrew Cavendish, the second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. Second sons did not inherit.
Then, on September 7, 1944, Andrew’s elder brother was killed by a German sniper. When the 10th Duke died in 1950, Andrew became the 11th Duke, and Deborah inherited Chatsworth. Chatsworth is one of the greatest treasure houses in England. It was also, in 1950, a catastrophe.
The 10th Duke died just 14 weeks before a family trust was due to take effect that would have sheltered the estate from death duties. The duty owed was approximately £3 million, equivalent to over £100 million today. Andrew and Deborah chose to fight. The sales began immediately and continued for 17 years.
Paintings were given to the nation. Thousands of acres were sold. The final death duty payment was made in 1974. It had taken 24 years.
The estate had been reduced by half, but Chatsworth survived. Deborah listed her occupation as housewife and built a business worth over a billion pounds. She restored the house and opened its doors. Chatsworth became one of the first great English houses to embrace tourism as a vocation.
By 2004, Chatsworth was receiving 500,000 visitors a year. The farm shop Deborah opened was generating £5 million in annual revenue. The estate today employs over 500 people. The Chatsworth House Trust holds assets valued at well over £1 billion.
Nancy published The Pursuit of Love in 1945. It sold 200,000 copies in its first year. The novel captured the Mitford childhood in amber, with Uncle Matthew based on David and the children on the Mitford sisters. Nancy died in Versailles on June 30, 1973, at age 69.
Jessica’s masterpiece was The American Way of Death, published in 1963. It exposed the American funeral industry and triggered congressional hearings. Jessica became, in the words of Time magazine, “the queen of the muckrakers. ” She died on July 22, 1996, in Oakland.
Diana outlived them all except Deborah. She and Mosley lived in France after the war. In every interview, she was asked the same question: did she regret her support for Hitler? She did not.
She never wavered. She died in Paris on August 11, 2003, at age 93. She had never apologized. In the graveyard of St.
Mary’s Church at Swinbrook, the sisters who scattered across the century lie side by side at last. David is here. Nancy is here. Unity is here.
Pamela, who died in 2008 at age 100, is here. Diana’s ashes were brought from Paris. Jessica is not here. She is buried in Oakland, California, far from the Cotswolds.
Deborah was the last to go. She died on September 24, 2014, at age 94. She had outlived all five of her sisters. In 2024, Unity’s diaries were discovered, confirming what had long been suspected.
The red ink entries. The word “angel. ” The 140 meetings. The Mitford sisters were not anomalies.
They were products of a class that had ruled England for centuries and by the 1920s had lost its reason for existing. The land was taxed. The money was gone. Into this vacuum of purpose, six brilliant, undereducated, chronically bored young women went looking for something to believe in.
Two of them found fascism. One found communism. One found literature. One found farming.
One found a farm shop. Privilege without purpose is a loaded weapon. The Mitford sisters prove it. They prove it in Unity’s diaries and Diana’s unrepentance and Jessica’s exile and Nancy’s bitter, brilliant novels.
They prove it in Deborah’s farm shop, which survives.