Who needs our tiresome royal family with their petty fallings out and tame activities when we have the glorious Mitford sisters? In their adventures, decadence and tradition jostle amusingly with the quirks and individual charms of the sisters and their world. Here in Jessica’s memoir, we are taken from debutantes bring presented to the queen (queuing in “a crowded corridor, filled with bare shoulders and the musty smell of rented ostrich feathers” (p88)) to public school rebels seeking to provoke the 1930s out of complacency (amidst a litany of rebellious thrusts, we learn that a motion that “pacifists should be sent to blazes” was defeated at a recent debate at Highgate School). The sisters are always spirited (their focus on “exuberant romance” contrasted to the “calculated frigidity” of those from plain origins (p169) but Jessica finds purpose (and so distaste for the “false theatricals” of the privileged communists of the 1930s) in the precocious, admirable character of Esmond Romilly, the lead public school rebel. After their adventure-rich tales of rejecting her family, eloping, and the Spanish Civil War, a move to the US brings somewhat more conventional anecdotes of finding work and getting on in a new culture, and so a calmer ending to this enjoyable narrative. ( )

Jessica Mitford era la quinta de seis hermanas de una legendaria familia aristocrática inglesa que durante los años treinta y cuarenta se harían famosas por sus conductas supuestamente escandalosas. Con el tiempo llegaría a convertirse en una de las periodistas norteamericanas más comprometidas y conocidas de su tiempo.

This is a very incisive and surprisingly skillful memoir of a very unusual upper-class childhood in England, partly because Jessica Mitford is the kind of author who can write with great power while seeming to write almost offhandedly, and partly because Mitford, who in young adulthood became a committed Communist, is more inclined than most to be frank about the English class system. Never fear, though, no cliché-ridden denunciations or screeds are to be found. Mitford was a Communist by choice, but an Englishwoman by birth, and the characteristically English skill of understatement is far more in evidence. I found I liked Mitford very much, even if I liked the first great love of her life, the young Esmond Romilly (Winston Churchill’s nephew), and her parents, less than she herself did. It’s one mark of a good writer that you can form your own reaction to characters that the writer is less than objective about.

There is an over-the-top element to almost every page of this true story that contrasts well with Mitford’s dry style. I suppose that most people who are interested in reading this book, which is in print as part of the New York Review of Books Classics series, know about the Mitford sisters, who included one Communist (Jessica), two fascists (one of whose weddings included Josef Goebbels as best man), and a duchess, among others; and they may know the author as being most famous as a journalist who exposed the excesses of the American funeral industry in The American Way of Death. Her young life does have to be read about to be believed. But I hope you will consider picking up this book if you have any interest at all in smart, complex people, or perhaps in an England that was lost with the last great war. ( )

Another of Slightly Foxed beautifully produced pocket sized hardbacks, this memoir by one of the six Mitford sisters (the most famous now being Nancy), covers Jessica’s life from birth in 1917 until 1940 when her husband joins the Canadian airforce. It was particularly interesting as it starts at Swinbrook House in the Cotswolds, a few miles from where I live (recently driven past with lambs in the fields below and bluebells in the nearby woods).

The British humour is of its time and social class, even though Jessica may be rebelling against it, for example about Nancy’s return to Swinbrook from a London bedsit after a month:
Jessica - “How could you! If I ever got away to a bed-sitter I’d never come back.”
Nancy - “Oh darling, but you should have seen it. After about a week, it was knee-deep in underclothes. I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.”
The first third of the book is about Jessica’s childhood and debuting (being presented to the King and Queen) in the 1935 London season.
The focus then changes to politics, with Jessica’s nascent Communist sympathies “kicking the traces” against the majority of her family’s more right wing views, with her sisters Unity (widely publicised friendship with Hitler) and Diana (married British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley) being Nazi supporters in the 1930’s.
In 1936 Jessica runs away from home, eloping with her cousin Esmond Romilly, making their way to Bilbao in Spain to report on the Civil War. However, as the daughter of a peer, the British papers sensationalise the story, making their continued stay in Spain untenable (as warned that their presence could jeopardise British assistance to the Loyalist government).
They live in London’s East End (poor district) for a period (where they lose their first child to measles) and then move to the United States in 1939 (Esmond not wanting to be conscripted if the British were to side with Germany against the USSR). Life is lived intensely, although it can read as living frivolously, always knowing that they can fall back on family and friends, as they are upper class. But this really is “Carpe diem”, even if only with hindsight, as once Germany invades France and it is clear that Britain will fight Nazi Germany, then Esmond volunteers for the Canadian Air Force in Britain, and is killed in action in 1941. I was surprised by how poignant I found this concluding chapter, as it seeks to try and explain how the frivolous eccentricity leads to this acceptance of the necessity of war for Esmond.

It is clichéd to say that “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (L P Hartley, The Go-Between). This book shows the truth of this, however clichéd, and does so with great humour. ( )

Biografía amable de una época convulsa. Interesante vida la de las Mitford. ( )