“The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters”, by Laura Thompson

416 pages, Picador, ISBN-13: 978-1250099549

Back on August 9^th, 2017 I reviewed The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell and said “Overall, then, The Sisters serves more as a primer on the Mitford Sisters than a biography; there are probably better works out there that I will have to find”.

Well, done-and-done, for The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson succeeds where Lovell failed in describing whom “those utterly maddening Mitford girls” really were…so then, just who were “The Mitfords”? Well, according to Ben Macintyre, a journalist for The Times, they were “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur”. Um…okay…if you knew who in the hell he was talking about, then these one-off descriptions are…well, pretty spot-on, if simplistic. If you don’t know, then The Six will fill you in pretty damn quick, once you delve beneath the thumbnails. This is a very English biography of a very English upper crust family: eccentric, brilliant, informative, maddening and delightful. In her introduction, Thompson addresses the question of why the Mitfords are significant enough to warrant so much ink and says that they are prize exhibits in a “Museum of Englishness”, which I believe means that the Mitfords epitomize certain aspects of the English character (see above) for good and for ill. With this in mind, here are a few thumbnail sketches of my own:

• Nancy (November 28^th, 1904 – June 30^th, 1973) was the oldest daughter who became a famous novelist, noted for such modern classics as Highland Fling and Love in a Cold Climate, as well as excellent biographies on Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. Nancy was the perhaps the most intellectual and talented of the Mitford women; despite her accomplishments, however, she was still rather jealous of Diana for being the prettiest of the Mitford women and, perhaps, for her domestic bliss.
• Pamela (November 25^th, 1907 – April 12^th, 1994) was, compared to her sisters, rather colorless; however, in his unpublished poem, The Mitford Girls, John Betjeman (who for a time was in love with her) referred to her as the “most rural of them all”, due to the fact she preferred to live quietly in the country – so quietly, in fact, that there is precious little info on her at all beyond her failed marriage and miscarriage (she may also have been a lesbian, having taken up with Italian horsewoman Giuditta Tommasi after her divorce).
• Thomas (January 2^nd 1909 – March 30^th, 1945) was the only son of David Freeman-Mitford and would have inherited everything had he not been killed in Burma while serving with the Devonshire Regiment. No Branwell Brontë he, for Tom was an accomplished man in his own right who had the misfortune of having to compete with a half-dozen mini-novas, although the portrait of the man in this work is one who seems not to have minded much.
• Diana (June 17^th, 1910 – August 11^th, 2003) was an out-and-out fascist who married the infamous Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist leader, and spent years in prison for her support of him and his movement during World War II. She was a personal friend of Hitler (she married Mosely in a wedding ceremony held in the home of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda) and is as complex a woman as ever there was one. Oh, and she was hawt, so I guess it’s true that beautiful women really can get away with murder. 
• Unity (August 8^th, 1914 – May 28^th, 1948) was born in Swastika (you read that correctly), Canada, where her father David and wife Sydney had gone in search of gold. She was literally a Nazi and loved Hitler, and tried to shoot herself in a suicide attempt shortly after war had been declared between Great Britain and Germany in 1939. Though she survived the attempt, she was never the same again, reverting almost to a child-like state; she died in 1948, never recovering from self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. 
• Jessica (September 11^th, 1917 – July 22^nd, 1996) was perhaps the most bourgeois of them all, although she would hate that description: she was a Communist until 1958 and she and her husband, Esmond Romilly, participated in the Spanish Civil War. She relocated to the United States and remarried after Romilly’s death in World War II; with her second husband, lawyer Robert Treuhaft, she became involved in the American Civil Rights movement and, along the way, wrote The American Way of Death, an expose of the American funeral business. 
• Deborah (March 31^st, 1920 – September 24^th, 2014) did quite well for herself, marrying Lord Andrew Cavendish, younger son of the 10^th Duke of Devonshire, who in the fullness of time became the 11^th Duke. Recognizing the commercial imperatives of running a stately home, she wrote several books about Chatsworth, played a key role in the restoration of the house and the enhancement of the gardens, developed other commercial activities such as Chatsworth Farm Shop and retail and catering operations, and assorted offshoots such as Chatsworth Food and Chatsworth Design. She was the last of the sisters to die, doing so in 2014.

Laura Thompson’s book was written for Mitford aficionados and focuses on the kaleidoscopic relationships among the six sisters, especially on their political divides and the loyalties and grudges that made the sisters alternately love and hate each other throughout their lives. There is relatively little about their childhood, at least compared to most other books on the subject. You won’t learn much of anything new in the way of facts and anecdotes, for Thompson’s purpose in writing seems to be to analyze the sisters’ clashes, shifting alliances, her view of the psychology of each of the six and, to some extent, their parents. Thompson doesn’t hesitate to take sides and you may or may not agree with all of her assessments, but what she manages to brilliantly portray is how these “posh-feral” women became British cultural touchstones through their unabashed devotion to their respective causes.

They seemed to embody the breadth of 20^th Century conflicts within one remarkable English aristocratic family, and one of the ways in which Thompson illustrates these women is by astutely comparing the wry contemporary assessments and countless (often-brutal) newspaper articles on the Mitford daughters to Nancy’s more benign fictional version and expat Jessica’s heavily embellished tell-all. Thompson proves her case that these fearless siblings helped shape one another, sometimes through encouragement, but mostly through sharp barbs and betrayal, leading to extremism in an already highly politicized era. Non-British readers may take longer to understand the sisters’ lasting appeal, but Thompson successfully shows how this group of six captured the zeitgeist by being utterly committed and completely “shame-free”. Even with all of their myriad faults, it’s hard, even now, not to admire, respect and envy the Mitfords.