But the sisters were nothing if not various, and to balance its two Fascists, the Mitfords had a Communist in Jessica, who from childhood had felt the discomfort of her family’s privilege over “Ordinary People”. I pair her with Nancy as the other Writer in the family – her memoir Hons and Rebels (1960, US title: Daughters and Rebels) is still in print, and her exposé of abuses in the US funeral home industry The American Way of Death (1963) was a bestseller – but her father (who was, remember, “normal”) saw her as one of the Traitors, and cut her out of his estate, with each item on his will dividing bequests among his daughters and ending with the words “except Jessica”. Red Sheep Cut Out of Will, said the papers. Jessica didn’t seem to mind, having made a life for herself in the US as an investigative reporter, where her phone was tapped by the FBI and she was hauled before the California State Committee on Un-American Activities. (She pleaded the fifth amendment.) Well, as Fanny’s cousin Linda points out in The Pursuit of Love, “being a Conservative is much more restful… whereas Communism seems to eat up all one’s life and energy.”
With all these conflicting forces at play, little wonder the Mitford sisters ended up so odd, and so uneven. They were Sister v Sister and England v England. They were the celebrity influencers of their time, a Bloomsbury Set in matryoshka doll form, famous for being famous when they weren’t famous for being notorious. They are fascinating to us in the same way that The Crown or Downton Abbey are – remote lives, beautifully clarified – with the added bonus of it all being real. And there is a fiction-like perfection to their most absurd life details: did I mention, for example, that Nazi-loving Unity was conceived in the Canadian township of Swastika, where Lord and Lady Redesdale had decamped to prospect for gold in 1913, having narrowly decided against travelling there the previous year on the Titanic’s maiden voyage?
At It Again, The Mad, Mad Mitfords, rang out one newspaper headline in 1938. They were at it then and they’re at it still, and the circus shows no signs of slowing, with the new TV adaptation of The Pursuit of Love, the recent publication of a second collective biography of the sisters, and even a series of crime novels starring the sisters from English novelist Jessica Fellowes (“absolute blissikins” – The Guardian). But then, if you’ve read this far, you already understand that. The Mitford sisters, with the possible exception of Jessica, would have hated you and me, of course, so to laugh at them feels like punching up. But whether we’re laughing with, laughing at or just taking in the show, the girls who never wanted to be bored achieved their aim, mainly by virtue of the fact that they were never, ever boring.
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