Diana Mitford was born on June 17, 1910, in London, England. She was the third daughter and fourth child of David Freeman Mitford, second Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Freeman Mitford, whose maiden name was Bowles and who came from a literary family.
Her father was known as an eccentric, and her mother held political views that later shaped Diana's life. At birth she had two older sisters, Nancy and Pamela, and a brother, Tom, born just a year before her. Three further sisters, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah, followed over the next decade.
Like the other Mitford children, Diana grew up in a somewhat isolated environment, homeschooled on her parents' estates in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. In 1926 she was briefly sent to school in Paris for about six months. She could not have known it then, but she would spend much of her later life in the French capital.
Even at that time Diana had developed an easy charm that drew people into her circle. Her younger sisters Unity, Jessica, and Deborah looked up to her rather than to the two eldest Mitford sisters, Nancy and Pamela. Eventually the spell would break for Jessica and Deborah, but Unity's adoration of her sister would contribute to her own tragic life story.
The Mitfords had long remained secluded in Oxfordshire, but by the 1920s the oldest sisters, Nancy and Pamela, had been introduced to the Royal Court and to London society, socializing with some of the mid-twentieth century's most prominent writers and artistic figures. In their youth, each of the Mitford sisters responded to these newfound freedoms in different ways.
Diana, well noted by the late 1920s as the prettiest of the Mitford sisters, married almost as soon as she was released from the confines of the estate in Oxfordshire. At just 18 she became engaged to the handsome and charming Bryan Guinness, of the Irish brewing dynasty whose surname graces pints of porter all over the world.
When she informed her parents, they were initially reluctant to allow her to marry because of her young age. They eventually gave in, and when Diana and Guinness married in January 1929 it was one of the weddings of the year in British high society.
Her marriage to Guinness was something of a culture shock for Diana. The family was incredibly wealthy, with armies of staff and servants at their homes in Ireland and England. Her new mother-in-law expressed amazement that Diana was able to fry an egg.
The couple lived on an allowance of twenty thousand pounds a year until Bryan would come into his inheritance. Along with a mansion in London, they had a home in Dublin not far from the Guinness Brewery and a house in Hampshire. Two sons, Jonathan and Desmond, followed in 1930 and 1931. But before they had even left infancy, Diana was being drawn elsewhere.
In February 1932 Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley while attending a party at the house of Emerald Cunard in London. Mosley was judged by many to be one of the most promising politicians in Britain in the 1920s, having previously been a member of the Conservative Party before crossing the floor to the Labour Party in the mid-1920s.
When Labour entered government in 1929, he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. But when the Labour Party membership rejected a memorandum he had drawn up in 1930, one that outlined a plan to reduce the massive unemployment that had emerged in Britain after the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, he left Labour too and started the New Party in 1932, right around the time he met Diana.
The New Party became the British Union of Fascists, with Mosley as its leader. Despite the fact that both Diana and Mosley were married, and their 14-year age gap, they were soon having an affair. Shortly thereafter Diana decided to leave her husband and became Mosley's mistress, horrifying her family and scandalizing British society.
Oswald, on the other hand, refused to leave his wife, Lady Cynthia Mosley. She died not long after, in 1933, due to complications arising from peritonitis. Despite Diana's divorce and the death of Lady Cynthia, the couple would not marry until 1936, as Mosley did not commit to the relationship for several years. He was briefly involved, for example, with his sister-in-law, Lady Elizabeth Metcalfe, after his first wife died.
Oswald and Diana finally married on October 6, 1936. The ceremony took place in Germany, in one of the homes of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler was even present at the event. By that time Diana had regularly been visiting Germany with Oswald to attend Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, and Oswald had forged ties to the German fascists, believing his party would one day assume control of Britain.
Two sons followed soon after their marriage, Alexander in 1938 and Max in 1940. Though her marital affairs had brought attention to the Mitford family, Diana's mother Sydney, brother Tom, and sister Unity shared her affinity for fascism. There is no doubting that Diana was a committed fascist, not blindly led into political extremism by infatuation with her new husband.
Her views in later life on the racial policies of the Nazis and their genocidal actions were complicated. At certain times she expressed some horror at what had happened; at others her statements were more neutral. Nevertheless, her politics in the 1930s caused a complete split with her elder sister Nancy.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939 following Germany's invasion of Poland, Diana and Oswald's political and social position in Britain collapsed. This was in stark contrast to the summer of 1939 before hostilities began, when a British Union of Fascists rally in London had drawn 30,000 attendees, one of the biggest political rallies in British history.
Compromised by his early support for the Nazis, Oswald began calling for a negotiated peace agreement with Germany. Perhaps surprisingly given the danger it posed, the British government did not move to ban the British Union of Fascists until May 23, 1940, following the passage of the Treachery Act that day.
Five weeks later Diana and Oswald were arrested, on the back of undoubtedly well-founded fears that the Mosleys and their followers would act as a fifth column for the Nazis in England if allowed to remain free. Diana was imprisoned in Holloway prison in London. Oswald was held separately at first, but in December 1941 Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had known Mosley well since the 1910s, intervened personally to allow Mosley to be moved to Holloway prison as well. They remained there until late 1943.
By that time the fate of the war was clear and the Mosleys were no longer perceived as a great threat to British security. They were released from prison but remained under house arrest for the remainder of the war.
The Mosleys were effectively social outcasts in Britain after the war ended. Nevertheless, Oswald attempted to revive his political career, in large part by reimagining himself as an advocate of a pan-European state. This was popular at the time as several Western European states began the process of creating what would eventually become the European Coal and Steel Community and then the European Economic Community.
He also established a union movement as a successor to the British Union of Fascists in 1948, but it did not gain traction. Ultimately the Mosleys were unable to leave behind the shame that came with their association with the Nazis in the 1930s. Accordingly, once they were given their passports back by the government in 1949, they began making plans to leave Britain.
Diana, Oswald, and her two sons left Britain in 1951, relocating first to Ireland, where they started in Galway and then at Fermoy in County Cork. Yet they spent most of their years in exile living at Orsay, near Paris, with occasional visits to South Africa, where their politics were far more acceptable to the far-right apartheid regime run by the National Party.
It was a curious life in exile. Oswald was frequently unfaithful, and Diana was certainly aware of his affairs but ignored them for the most part. When asked about her ties to the Nazis in the 1930s, she expressed outward revulsion for the Holocaust and the genocidal racial policies of the Nazi regime, but she also refused to entirely disavow her friendships with Hitler and other senior Nazis.
In one interview she said that people would go on persecuting her until she said Hitler was ghastly, and asked what the point was in saying that. She acknowledged that he was a monster who did very cruel and terrible things, but said that did not alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure. She described it as fascinating, at 24, to sit and talk to him, to ask him questions and get answers, even if they were not true ones. She said no torture on Earth would get her to say anything different.
In the many interviews she gave over the years, and in accounts provided by her friends and acquaintances, there is little doubting that she was anti-Semitic. She once pondered in an interview with the Guardian that Europe's Jews should have been relocated to Uganda, a thin disguise for an allusion to a Nazi plan to deport Jewish people to the African island of Madagascar, which had briefly been considered in 1940.
While the Mosleys were effectively unable to involve themselves in any substantial fashion in British politics after the war, both Diana and Oswald wrote and published extensively during these decades. To facilitate their work they established Euphorion Books, their own publishing company, which they named after a character in Goethe's Faust. Mosley subsequently translated Goethe's work and published it through Euphorion.
Much of Diana's writing was political. She edited The European for six years between 1953 and 1959 while living in France, a political and cultural magazine that tried to further many of the Mosleys' political ideas. Curiously, the magazine favored British entry into the newly founded European Economic Community. More broadly, The European included contributions from the American poet Ezra Pound, who had been a fan of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism, the South African poet Roy Campbell, and the British writer and royal advocate Henry Williamson, who had created the character of Tarka the Otter and was a supporter of European fascism in the 1930s.
Diana also published several books. One, The Duchess of Windsor, published in 1980, was a biography of Wallis Simpson, whose desire to marry King Edward VIII in 1936 had caused the abdication crisis that year. By that time the Duchess of Windsor had lived next door to Diana and Oswald in Paris and had also seen controversy by visiting Germany in 1937 and meeting Hitler and other Nazi leaders after Edward lost his throne.
Two personal memoirs also appeared. First came A Life of Contrasts in 1977, a straightforward autobiography. Then came Loved Ones in 1985, in which she reflected on some of the famous figures she had known over the years, including her sisters and the author Evelyn Waugh.
Finally, Diana wrote for several other prominent publications, including articles for The Tatler in the late 1960s and as a book reviewer for both the New Statesman and the London Evening Standard from the 1970s through to the 1990s. Her background and her writings, including a defense of Magda Goebbels' decision to give her six children poison in the Führerbunker at the end of the Second World War, caused controversy and infamous clashes with the late Christopher Hitchens and Max Hastings, a prominent historian of the Second World War and newspaper editor.
Diana's husband Oswald died on December 3, 1980, also in Paris. Many obituaries and news reports noted the passing of the leader of the British fascist movement, but his demise was not greeted with the sort of outpouring of anger at his political career that might have occurred had he died closer to the Second World War. Many people had simply forgotten the Mosleys, or had not been alive in the 1930s and early 1940s.
After her husband's death Diana remained in France and continued to write extensively, though she lost her position as a book reviewer at the London Evening Standard in the mid-1990s when Max Hastings determined that he did not want any more reviews by, as he put it, a bloody lady Hitler running the paper. Her reputation as a leading female British fascist was still alive and well 50 years after the war ended.
Diana eventually died in Paris on August 11, 2003, following complications arising from a stroke she had suffered a week earlier. This was compounded by the heat wave that hit Western Europe that late summer, as temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius for 10 days in a row in France. Diana was 93 years of age at the time.
She was buried back in England, in Oxfordshire, in the Mitford family plot next to her sisters. Obituaries were scornful of her ties to the Nazis, and they debated her own political views, which remained somewhat unclear and contested even then.