Penguinlady's Full Review: Mary S. Lovell - The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitf...
I’ve been interested in the Mitford family since I read Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death back in the 1960s. I didn’t know much about them, but occasionally I’d hear mention of one of them - there seemed to be so many Mitfords! - and mentally make a note to learn more. It wasn’t until 2001 that a comprehensive book was published; there are biographies and autobiographies of individual members of the family, but as far as I know, no single-volume compendium until this one.
That book is The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell. Ms. Lovell seems to specialize in biographies of interesting women; her other titles include bios of aviatrices Beryl Markham and Amelia Earhart, and a biography of Richard and Isabel Burton.
THE FAMILY
As is my wont in reviewing bios, I like to give a little information about the subject/s before discussing the book itself, so you know if they are interesting enough to you to pursue further.
The Mitford clan is the epitome of old English gentry and minor aristocracy. According to the family tree in the front of The Sisters, David Mitford, paterfamilias of the gaggle and 2nd Baron Redesdale, is descended from the Ogilvys, Earls of Airlie. His family tree is rife with names like Algernon, Bertram, and Clementine. In fact, one of the Clementines was married to Winston Churchill. On their mother’s side, the sisters were related to the Bowles family; no nobility there, but certainly an old and respected family.
David Freeman Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, (1878-1958): “Farve,” as he was known to his brood, was very much a product of his time and class. A not-very-good businessman until his older brother died and the title and lands passed to him, he and his wife took a somewhat hands-off attitude toward raising their children. He roared and yelled a lot, but was pretty harmless. His marriage ended, for all practical purposes, just as Britain entered the war, and although he and his wife remained married and saw each other occasionally, they never again lived together. It’s been said that the shenanigans of his daughters broke his health.
Sydney Bowles Mitford, (1880-1963): “Muv” drifted through life with her tempestuous clan seemingly untouched by the nitty-gritty of real life. She left the raising of her children to her staff, and is famous for responding, when Unity raced into her study and interrupted her to tell her that Decca was standing on the roof threatening to kill herself by jumping off, “Oh, poor duck. I hope she won’t do anything so terrible,” before returning to her paperwork. She became a staunch admirer of Hitler, thanks to her daughters Diana and Unity, which precipitated the disintegration of her marriage. But she was always there for her children, and when incontinent Unity returned from Germany with her brain damage, it was Muv who cared for her for the rest of her life.
So here are the sisters:
Nancy, (1904-1973): The oldest, who became an hugely successful writer of thinly disguised fiction that poked somewhat savage fun at her own family and others of their ilk (Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, Wigs on the Green, The Blessing, Noblesse Oblige, Pigeon Pie, Don’t Tell Alfred, and The Water Beetle.) An inveterate, and occasionally cruel, teaser of her sisters, she was tall and dark with wavy brown hair, the only such child in a family of English blondes. She married a rotter and spent the bulk of her productive years in Paris, pining away for a dashing officer in the French government who took advantage of her obsession but refused to marry her because she wasn’t French. He later married a woman who wasn’t French.
Pamela, (1907-1994): “Woman” was the most “normal” of the lot. Pamela married a scientist, from whom she was later divorced, and spent most of her life as a country woman. She has attracted the least attention because she didn’t write, she didn’t set the society pages afire, she didn’t do much of anything except live a quiet and, we assume, reasonably happy, life.
Thomas, (1909-1945): No, he wasn’t a sister; he was the only boy in the bunch, and as such, seemed to have an abundance of charm and good humor. He probably needed it, given the incredibly strong personalities of his sisters. He was killed in the war after distinguishing himself in combat.
Diana, (1910-2003): Diana, who died last summer, was one of the two most controversial sisters of the bunch. Beautiful and charming, she was the muse of several artists in her teens, and married Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing family fortune, when she was 18, in a glittering wedding that outshone her debut earlier that year. She left him four years and two babies later and ran off with Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and probably the most hated man in England. They remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, which made her the most hated woman in England. Her books, A Life of Contrasts, The Duchess of Windsor, and Loved Ones, boosted her into the ranks of the “Mitford Family Industry” - writing. She and Mosley were imprisoned for more than three years during the war, ostensibly for their own protection, but never wavered in their commitment to both Fascism and each other. In the years leading up to WW II, she cozied up to Hitler in an attempt to establish broadcasting facilities for the BUF in Germany. She had access to him through the good graces of her sister...
Unity, (1914-1948): Unity, known as “Boud” or “Bobo” to her sisters, was by far the most controversial sister. A striking tall blonde beauty, Unity Valkyrie, who was conceived during her parents’ sojourn in the unfortunately-named town of Swastika, Canada, lived up to her karma by becoming obsessed with Nazism while in her teens, probably in response to her sister Diana’s involvement with Fascism and Jessica’s commitment to Communism. (More on that in a minute.) She persuaded her parents to let her study German in Germany and managed, by dint of careful planning and perseverance, to meet Hitler and become quite friendly with him. She was a raging anti-Semite who proudly wore her Hitler-signed swastika badge everywhere, including in England. As war loomed, she vowed to commit suicide if her two beloved countries, England and Germany, went to war. When they did, she made good on her promise but botched the job, shooting herself in the head but not killing herself. Hitler arranged for her transport home, where she lived in a somewhat childlike state for another ten years. There is some evidence that she wanted to marry Hitler, who, of course, would never marry a non-German.
Jessica, (1917-1996): Funny, irreverent, and tormented, “Decca” was probably the best-known of the sisters to American audiences. Jessica raged at her parents for denying her, and the rest of the sisters, a real education; after tutoring by their governess, they were packed off to finishing school, a fact that created huge upheavals between Jessica and her parents, who were unwilling to let their daughters be exposed to the “wrong sort of people” in school. At the age of 18, she ran off with her black-sheep cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Churchill’s, to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After the British sent a battleship to fetch her home, the young Romillys went to the US where they tried to make a living as writers and bar-tenders before Esmond enlisted in the Canadian army. He was killed on a mission over the North Sea. Decca found a job with the American Communist party, moved to Oakland, remarried, had another child, and wrote several muck-raking books, of which The American Way of Death is the best known. Not to be outdone by her sister Nancy, though, she also wrote a memoir of her early life, Hons and Rebels. The success of those and her other books, A Fine Old Conflict, Poison Penmanship, Kind and Usual Punishment, and Faces of Philip enabled her to leave her job with the Party, with which she had become disenchanted as the stories of Stalin’s wretched excesses spread, but remained a radical until she died.
Deborah, (1920 -): “Debo” had perhaps the hardest row to hoe. Raised alone by her decidedly eccentric parents after her sibs had left the home, she functioned as mediator between her warring family, in which someone was always on “non-speakers” with someone else (Decca refused to have anything to do with Diana for decades, she and Pam went at it for a while... This was a volatile crew.) Debo married Andrew Cavendish, second son of the Duke of Devonshire, whose older son and heir to the title, Billy, had married JFK’s sister Kathleen, “Kick,” in the face of ferocious opposition from her very Catholic family. Billy died in the war a few months later - Mama Rose Kennedy is reported to have said, with grim satisfaction, that this was God’s retribution for the marriage - and as soon as it was established that Kick wasn’t pregnant, the title passed to Andrew, making Debo the Duchess. They inherited Cavendish, a huge estate, along with other properties, and she appears to have lived normally and quietly - those are relative terms in this family - there ever since, turning the estate into one of the major tourist attractions in England.
OK, that’s the cast. Now, on to...
THE BOOK
In addition to an Introduction and family tree, there are 22 chapters, divided into chunks of time. Beginning with Victorian Roots: 1894-1904 and continuing through Relatively Calm Waters: 1980-2000, the author traces, in somewhat diminishing degrees of detail, the lives of this eccentric gang.
The book is extensively foot-noted. The footnotes, in the back of the book, run to 46 pages. Lovell evidently had free access to family papers and letters, because a large percentage of the notes are based on these sources.
There is also a 4-page bibliography, for those who seek more information, and a detailed 26-page index. My only problem with the latter is that while extensive, it’s organized strictly around people and places, rather than key words or ideas. So my attempts to locate a quote of Muv’s (“Why do all my daughters love dictators?" or words to that effect) were fruitless.
There are also three sections of photographs.
One of the things that bothers me when I read biographies is the insertion of the author into the narrative. Ideally, s/he should be telling the story from an invisible perspective, completely objectively, with no personal point of view. It’s a hard one to pull off, especially when tackling subjects as huge as these, with the wealth of material available to draw on, but Lovell manages it quite nicely. It’s hard to tell how she feels about these girls, even as she mentions Decca’s conviction that she had a desperately unhappy childhood, an assertion that is not supported by anything, even her own writings. Unity definitely went off the deep end in her obsession with Hitler, dragging her sister Diana and their Muv along with her, and although Muv’s stance caused the disintegration of her own marriage, the author manages to retain an objective air about it all. Just the facts, ma’am. One gets the sense that she is writing as much about a class as about individuals; the parents, at least, were very much products of their time and station: "...honest, well-meaning, salt-of-the-earth, admittedly slightly eccentric, socially retiring minor aristocrats; thoroughly nice people who, because of their extraordinary daughters, were propelled unwillingly, blinking and unprepared, into the international spotlight.” (From the Introduction.)
The only complaint I have about the general tenor of the book is that there is no real explanation of the forces that drove three of the sisters to commit their lives, in the face of overwhelming opposition and adversity, to the three most oppressive, repressive, and totalitarian forms of dictatorship known. We get a hint about Decca, who seems almost to be reacting in a knee-jerk way to Diana’s involvement with Mosley and his Fascism and, at the behest of Esmond Romilly, comes to see her family as not only the symbol of all that is evil in the world, but also as the literal, actual cause of it. Romilly, described as soul-less and evil, albeit charming, by others, is completely devoid of emotion and sentiment and doesn’t understand why Decca would want to have anything to do with her bourgeois family in the face of all the poverty and injustice in the world. The fact that this same family produced his dear wife seems to be lost on him. But Decca’s eye-opening occurred before she met him, and that’s the puzzle.
And what drove Unity to immerse herself in Nazism, at risk of physical harm when she went home and paraded her swastika badge in the street? We never learn.
Diana’s commitment to Fascism is a little easier to understand. As the deb and then bride of the year, she lived an incredibly wealthy, social, and shallow life, and it wasn’t until she met the dashing Mosley that she ever gave a thought to politics. So for her to follow the man she loved into the belly of a hated belief system made manifest isn’t too surprising, although she initially comes across as smarter than that. She may have initially embraced fascism for the sake of Mosley and their relationship - understandable, if regrettable - but her steadfast commitment to it, which lasted until her death last summer, is harder to comprehend. According to a documentary film-maker who met her during filming, "It is hard to convey her charm, even more to defend her politics. The latter are neither flaunted nor evaded but when they come up in conversation, they are defended or explained with a temperance of language equaled by gentleness of tone.” I just wish he had recounted her explanation.
Other than these issues, the only other things I would change about the book is that as the story nears the present, the details get sparser and more skimpy. Huge chunks of time disappear. Perhaps there wasn’t as much to say about these women as they aged, but compared with the detail of the earlier chapters, I felt that I was being rushed through the end of the story.
I’ve always had an abiding interest in biography and social history, so this kind of book is my bread and butter. If it piques your interest too, you’ll probably enjoy this book.
This is the Story of a close, loving family splintered by the violent ideologies of Europe between the wars. Jessica was a Communist; Debo became the ...More at HotBookSale
This is the Story of a close, loving family splintered by the violent ideologies of Europe between the wars. Jessica was a Communist; Debo became the ...More at HotBookSale
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.