The six Mitford sisters were British aristocrats whose names became notorious in the 1930s, though for wildly different and often scandalous reasons. They have been remembered as the Duchess, the Fascist, the Communist, the Nazi, the Novelist, and the One Forgotten. Their story is one of a single family split violently apart by the great political storms of the twentieth century. The family was old English aristocracy, able to trace its roots in England back before the Norman Conquest of 1066.
When William the Conqueror crossed from France with his Norman knights, an ancestor named Sir John de Mitford ruled Mitford Castle in Northumberland, on the Scottish border. The family kept a landed presence there for the next eight hundred years. The sisters’ father was David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, a notoriously eccentric peer. Their mother was Sydney Bowles, whose father Thomas had been a Member of Parliament and a prominent publisher who founded several well-known British magazines, including the original Vanity Fair.
David and Sydney married in 1904 and had seven children. Nancy arrived within months of the wedding. Pamela followed in 1907, then their only son Tom in 1909, and another daughter in 1910. There was a lull before Unity was born in August 1914, just days after the outbreak of the First World War.
Jessica arrived in 1917, and Deborah in 1920. Tom would die in service in the Pacific in the final months of the Second World War in 1945, but nearly all the sisters lived long lives. Their upbringing was unusual. The girls were homeschooled in a chaotic manner and raised by parents who were distant and neurotic in equal measure.
The household was deeply conservative, with their father staunchly traditionalist, while their mother drifted toward fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, a political attachment so strong it eventually led to separation in 1943 in the midst of the war. Nancy, the eldest, turned to the extensive library at Batsford House to escape her strange upbringing, and it was there her literary ambitions first developed. Introduced to British high society on her eighteenth birthday in 1922, she became a formidable figure of the interwar period, striking up friendships with writers such as Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman. She was one of the most publicly visible members of the Bright Young Things, the group of young aristocrats and upper-middle-class figures known in 1920s Britain for their parties and heavy drinking as much as their artistic work.
In 1933 she married Peter Rodd, the son of a British diplomat and politician. It was an unhappy marriage, entered into only after a long courtship with Erskine Hamish, the son of an earl, failed to lead to marriage. Nancy apparently did not know that Hamish was gay and had at one time been involved with her younger brother Tom. In the 1930s she began writing seriously, obtaining a regular column in The Lady, the magazine founded by her maternal grandfather, and publishing her first novel, Highland Fling, in 1931.
Though the marriage was failing and they would not divorce until 1957, she and Rodd lived apart from the late 1930s onward. During the Second World War she became involved with Gaston Palewski, a French officer who had made his way to England after the fall of France in the summer of 1940. Their passionate affair proved the great love of her life. After the war they settled in France, and there Nancy entered a second stage of her literary career as a historian, publishing well-regarded biographical studies of Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, Madame de Pompadour, and Voltaire.
The relationship did not survive, and she grew increasingly ill with cancer. She died in Paris in 1973. Pamela lived the least controversial life of the six. A private woman who liked a simple country existence, she was known as the quiet Mitford and the Forgotten Sister.
Her 1936 marriage to Derek Jackson, a wealthy and esteemed atomic physicist, drew public attention, not least because Jackson was a notorious bisexual who eventually married six times and was aggressively anti-Semitic. They shared a love of horse riding but divorced in 1951. Thereafter Pamela became the close companion of an Italian horsewoman named Giuditta Tommasi, and it is widely suspected they were lovers. They split in the early 1970s, and Pamela lived quietly in the Cotswolds and London.
In 1994 she fell down steep stairs, broke two bones in her leg, and died in hospital on 12 April 1994 at the age of 86. The middle sisters, Diana and Unity, were by far the most controversial. They took after their mother, whose politics were scandalous and who refused in the Second World War to renounce her support for fascism. Their brother Tom shared the taint, having become affiliated with Nazism on a visit to Berlin in the late 1920s; during the war he refused to take up arms against the Germans and was instead sent to fight in the Pacific.
Diana’s flirtation with fascism was extremely public. She had married Brian Walter Guinness, heir to the Barony of Moyne, in 1929 when she was only nineteen. That marriage collapsed after she met Oswald Mosley, fourteen years her senior. Mosley had been a promising figure in British politics in the 1920s, serving as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government between 1929 and 1931.
He became disillusioned with mainstream politics, and as much of Europe swung toward more extreme ideologies in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, he founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932. He and Diana met around that time at a garden party. Both were married, but Diana soon left her first husband, and Mosley’s wife died in 1933. Their courtship developed steadily, and they were married in 1936 at the home of the German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in Berlin, with Adolf Hitler among the guests.
The British Union of Fascists had some support in Britain during the 1930s, but once war with Germany began in September 1939 it evaporated. In 1940, as Germany invaded Western Europe and the Blitz began, Oswald and Diana were incarcerated by the government. They remained imprisoned until 1943, when the war had turned against Germany and figures like the Mosleys were no longer considered a major threat to domestic security. Afterward they could not remain in Britain and moved to France.
Diana developed a considerable literary career there, editing The European, a magazine with pro-fascist leanings, and for a time writing reviews for The New Statesman. She remained unrepentant about her fascist past until her death in Paris in 2003 at the age of 93. Unity shared her sister’s beliefs and went further. Born in 1914, she came of age as Europe’s politics polarized.
She shared a room with her sister Jessica, her ideological opposite. At one point in their teenage years they drew a chalk line down the center of the room: Unity decorated her half with a Nazi swastika sticker and a portrait of Hitler, while Jessica hung a Communist hammer and sickle and a picture of Lenin. Unity was pulled into British and German fascism through Diana’s relationship with Mosley. In 1933, when she was nineteen, the sisters attended the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, the first of the great spectacles after the Nazis seized power.
Unity returned to Germany the following year to study at a language school in Munich, but her true purpose seems to have been to meet Hitler in person, a feat she accomplished some months later. Throughout 1935 and 1936 she attempted to ingratiate herself with him, apparently seeking a romantic attachment with a dictator twenty-five years her senior. Her efforts came to nothing as Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun deepened, but Unity nonetheless became part of the inner circle of the Nazi leadership. Her virulent anti-Semitism, which exceeded that of Diana and Tom, was well known, and MI5 monitored her activities in Germany.
When war broke out in September 1939, Hitler advised Unity and Diana to return home to Britain. Unity was devastated and attempted to take her own life by shooting herself in the head. Hitler paid her medical bills. She made a partial recovery and returned to England early in 1940, but the injury caused brain damage from which she never fully recovered.
Her story has one further intriguing twist. It is believed she entered a maternity hospital and possibly gave birth to a child who was put up for adoption shortly afterward. The records are so hazy that speculation has grown for decades that the child was fathered by Hitler and lived somewhere in Britain through the second half of the twentieth century, unaware of his parentage. There is no concrete evidence to support this.
If Unity did give birth at all, it was most likely fathered by John Andrews, an RAF pilot with whom she had a brief relationship at the time. Unity’s health declined through the 1940s from ongoing complications of the shooting. She died in 1948 at the age of 33 from meningitis caused by cerebral swelling around the bullet in her head. Jessica, the younger sister, embraced the opposite politics with equal passion.
She reacted intensely against her conservative, aristocratic upbringing and reviled her parents’ views. In rebellion at nineteen she married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, who had just returned from fighting with the Communists in the Spanish Civil War. They spent the late 1930s in North America, perpetually short of money despite their backgrounds. When war broke out he joined the Canadian Air Force and was killed in action in November 1941, when his plane disappeared returning from a bombing mission over Nazi Germany.
Jessica’s second chapter opened in 1943 when she married Robert Treuhaft, an American civil rights lawyer. They moved to California, where she became an American citizen. They joined the American Communist Party, activities which brought them before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the mid-1950s at the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. But it was in the 1960s that Jessica’s fame grew, as she became one of America’s most noted investigative journalists, exposing the dark underside of the American funeral industry and offering early exposés of the American prison system.
She wrote many books, including an autobiography, Hons and Rebels, which anatomized her family’s peculiar politics and background. She has been lauded by figures like Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling for her courageous political beliefs and journalism.
She died of lung cancer in 1996 at age 78. The youngest sister, Deborah, led a notable life of a quieter kind than her siblings. In 1941, at the height of the war, she married Lord Andrew Cavendish, son of the tenth Duke of Devonshire, one of the oldest and richest noble lines in the British aristocracy, and heir to Chatsworth House, one of England’s finest noble estates in the Peak District. Deborah’s claim to fame was the restoration and development of Chatsworth itself, which she turned into one of England’s stateliest homes with gardens and tourist amenities, and she patronized the redevelopment of the villages on the estate.
She wrote books on Chatsworth’s history and its current state. Politically she leaned toward Jessica, joining the left-leaning but short-lived Social Democratic Party in the 1980s. Deborah died in 2014 at the age of 94, bringing the story of the Mitford sisters to an end 110 years after Nancy’s birth in 1904.