The six Mitford sisters of Oxfordshire were among the most talked-about women in twentieth-century Britain. They were the duchess, the fascist, the communist, the Nazi, the novelist, and the one most people could never quite place. Born into a landed family whose English roots ran back before the Norman Conquest, they were the children of David Freeman-Mitford, the eccentric second Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney, whose own father had been a prominent writer and publisher. The family was deeply conservative, and Sydney drifted toward fascism in the 1930s.
That political current, more than anything else, would tear the sisters apart. Nancy, the eldest, born in 1904, spent a peculiar childhood under parents who briefly tried raising children without rebuke or anger. The experiment failed, and she became a domineering and troublesome girl. Educated at home by governesses, she discovered writing early, producing a family magazine with her siblings in the late 1910s.
At eighteen she entered high society as a debutante, was presented to King George V, and soon joined the Bright Young Things, the aristocratic bohemian circle whose parties and artistic pursuits defined the London social scene of the 1920s. There she befriended Evelyn Waugh, whose novel Brideshead Revisited would appear in 1945. Nancy’s love life was unhappy. She had a long affair with Hamish St Clair-Erskine, who was gay, a fact she seems not to have grasped, then married Peter Rodd in December 1933 after a courtship of only months.
The marriage was miserable almost from the start. Peter was unfaithful, and Nancy suffered repeated miscarriages. By the late 1930s the marriage existed in name only. In early 1939 she went to the south of France to help care for wounded Spanish refugees fleeing Francisco Franco’s forces, an experience that hardened her against fascism just as several of her siblings embraced it.
In September 1942 she met Gaston Palewski, a Frenchman working in London for General Charles de Gaulle. She was devoted to him for the rest of her life, but he was far less committed, remaining unfaithful and never marrying her. After the war Nancy settled in Paris. Her fifth novel, The Pursuit of Love, published in 1945, sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year and made her a literary star.
She turned to historical biography in the 1950s, writing popular studies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XIV, and Frederick the Great. Her health declined steadily through headaches and failing eyesight, and in 1972 she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. She died of cancer at Versailles on 30 June 1973, aged sixty-eight, and was cremated and buried in England. Pamela, born in 1907, was the most rural of the sisters.
She loved animals, gardens, and country life from childhood, and never took to London society. She suffered from polio as a girl, which left one leg partially lame, but it never stopped her. The poet John Betjeman, who was briefly infatuated with her, called her the most rural of them all. In 1936 she married Derek Jackson, a brilliant Oxford physicist and amateur jockey who shared her love of horses.
It was understood to be a marriage of convenience; Derek was bisexual and Pamela was almost certainly a lesbian, though she kept her private life fiercely guarded. They had no children. During the war, Derek flew more than a thousand hours as a navigator working on radar and air defense, while Pamela took in some of Diana’s children after Diana was imprisoned as a Nazi sympathizer. The marriage ended in divorce in 1951.
Pamela stayed on at their Irish estate, Tullamaine Castle, then moved to Switzerland with her companion, an Italian horse trainer named Giuditta Tommasini. She remained there until 1972, returning to England with her beloved dogs only once they had all died. She spent her old age in the countryside, made a brief television appearance discussing chickens, and died in April 1994, aged eighty-six, after breaking her weakened leg in a fall. Her last words were reportedly a question about which horse had won the Grand National.
Diana, born in 1910, was the prettiest of the sisters and the most dangerous. At eighteen she married Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing dynasty, in one of the weddings of the year. But in February 1932 she met Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and soon left her husband for him. They married in October 1936 in Germany, at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler present.
Diana was a committed fascist, not a passive follower. During the war she and Mosley were arrested in June 1940 under the Treachery Act. She was held in Holloway Prison until November 1943, then kept under house arrest until the war’s end. After the defeat of Germany, the Mosleys became social outcasts in Britain.
In 1951 they left for Ireland, then settled in Paris, where they lived out an odd exile, publishing through their own press and editing the political magazine The European. Diana remained unrepentant. Asked about her friendship with Hitler, she said the truth was that he was an interesting figure and that no torture on earth would make her say otherwise. She died in Paris in August 2003, aged ninety-three, during the great heat wave that killed thousands across Europe.
Unity, born in August 1914, became the most tragic figure of the family. In 1933 she traveled to Germany with Diana and Mosley for a Nazi rally and met Hitler. She became obsessed with him. Moving to Munich, she stalked him for months, waiting in a restaurant he frequented until he finally invited her to his table.
He called her a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood and believed she had been sent to him by fate. She met him more than a hundred times, more than any other British person. In September 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany, she shot herself in the head in Munich. The bullet lodged in her brain and could not be removed.
She survived but never recovered her mind. Brought back to England in 1940, she lived on, cared for by her mother, with the mental age of a child. In May 1948 the bullet shifted, her brain swelled, and she died of meningitis, aged thirty-three. Jessica, born in 1917, was the red sheep.
She shared a bedroom with Unity in the early 1930s, divided by a chalk line, Unity’s side covered with Hitler portraits and swastikas, Jessica’s with Lenin and the hammer and sickle. In 1937, at nineteen, she eloped with Esmond Romilly, a socialist and anti-fascist who was Winston Churchill’s nephew-in-law, and went to Spain to support the Republicans in the civil war. Her tiny daughter died of measles in 1938. Esmond was lost on a bombing raid over Hamburg in November 1941.
Jessica remarried, became an American citizen, joined the Communist Party, and worked in the civil rights movement. Her memoir Hons and Rebels, published in 1960, became a classic. In 1963 she published The American Way of Death, an exposé of the funeral industry’s exploitation of the bereaved, which led to congressional hearings. She spent the rest of her life as a muckraking journalist and died of lung cancer in 1996, aged seventy-eight, at a funeral that cost $58 before cremation.
Deborah, born in 1920, was the duchess. She dined with Hitler as a teenager, but politics never took root in her. In 1941 she married Andrew Cavendish, and when his elder brother was killed in Belgium in 1944, the couple became heir and heir presumptive to the dukedom of Devonshire. In 1950 Andrew succeeded as the 11th Duke, and Deborah became mistress of Chatsworth House, then a run-down, heavily indebted estate owing some seven million pounds in taxes.
She saved it. She sold artworks and a second palace, restored the house, and turned it into one of the most popular tourist destinations in England, attracting more than half a million visitors a year. She endured her husband’s drinking and infidelities and the deaths of four of her children. In 1999 she was made a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.
She died in September 2014, aged ninety-four, the last of the six sisters, and was buried from Chatsworth to the sound of Elvis Presley.