Jessica Mitford was one of the greatest wits of the 20th century, and perhaps of any century. Her books, most famously The American Way of Death, eviscerated the American funeral industry, our prison system, and obstetrical care in the United States. But to those in Britain, where she was born in 1917, Mitford was best known for her first book, titled Hons and Rebels in the UK and Daughters and Rebels in the US. The book is a memoir of the first third of her life, covering the 1920s and 30s and the early years of World War II. She died in 1996 in Oakland, California, at the age of 78, having established herself as a civil rights activist as well as a celebrated bestselling author. But the memoir recounts the most interesting chapters of her life, when she was the “Red Sheep” among the notorious six Mitford sisters.
Seven unlikely offspring in one over-the-top family
Only in Britain can a family as eccentric and outrageous as the Mitfords have sprung into existence. The paterfamilias, David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, was such a parody of eccentric English minor nobility that he couldn’t possibly have been invented by any novelist, with the possible exception of P. G. Wodehouse. “Farve” to his seven children, and “Muv,” managed to create enough distance between themselves and their offspring that each of the girls developed a personality and a course in life that veered sharply from all the others.
- The eldest, Nancy, became a novelist who wrote savage satirical novels about the family.
- Pamela spurned life in the city, remaining in the countryside nearly all her life. Still, she managed to produce scandals all her own through her marriage to a bisexual, six-times-married physician and then after her divorce as a companion to an Italian horsewoman.
- Diana first shacked up with and then married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. She was a fascist all her life, denying the Holocaust and expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler.
- Unity outdid her older sister by going directly to the top, ingratiating herself with Hitler and his hangers-on. before the war. She attempted suicide in Munich after Germany’s declaration of war with Britain. But she succeeded only in incapacitating herself to the extent that she could no longer care for herself.
- Deborah married the son of a duke who became heir to the dukedom on his father’s death. She was one of the most prominent members of British society for decades.
- Brother Tom was a Nazi sympathizer who refused to fight against Germany. He died in action in the Pacific in 1945.
In Hons and Rebels, Jessica, known to one and all as Decca, the fifth of the six sisters, tells the hilarious tale of growing up in Oxfordshire in the midst of this menagerie.
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford (1960) 305 pages ★★★★☆
Decca Mitford’s exotic life
Long before that, Decca renounced her privileged background while still a teenager. She then scandalized and upset the family by running away with Winston Churchill’s nephew, Esmond Romilly. Romilly was a romantic figure who had fought in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the Republic. Decca had set her sights on him from afar after reading in the press of his exploits. The young man did manage to return to Spain briefly but as a journalist, not a fighter. The couple then moved to the United States, where they traveled and worked odd jobs. But he returned to England when war broke out and went missing in action on a bombing run over Nazi Germany in February 1941.
Decca Mitford was “the rarest of birds, an exotic creature,” as a San Francisco journalist wrote after she died. Her life was as off-center as any of her siblings’s. From an early age, she became enamored with Communism. She considered herself a socialist all her life, although she didn’t join the Party until 1943 when she married her second husband, attorney Robert Treuhaft, in Oakland. (Decca became an American citizen in 1944.) The couple both resigned from the Party in 1958 in the wake of Nikita Khruschchev’s “Secret Speech” exposing Stalin’s (but not his own) crimes.
Hons and Rebels, which appeared in 1960, was the first of Decca’s 12 books, the last in 1998, two years after her death. Only two of her four children survived her.
About the author
Jessica Mitford died at the age of 78 in 1996. She was then a resident of Oakland, California, practically a neighbor of mine, and I was privileged to know her slightly. I had driven her across the Bay to speak at a breakfast salon I had helped set up in San Francisco in the 1970s, and we spoke at length then. She was just as funny in person as in her books. Decca, as she was known to everyone acquainted with her, was the author of 12 books, two of which appeared posthumously. Hons and Rebels was her first, followed in 1963 by The American Way of Death, which was a runaway bestseller and remained her best-known work for the rest of her life.
For related reading
This excellent novel casts more light on the notorious Mitfords: The Mitford Affair by Marie Benedict (Blundering through the 1930s with the notorious Mitford sisters).
In the following posts you’ll find similar books and others that cast light on some of what Jessica Mitford writes:
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