Mitford sisters' world, The

Radical Society, Apr 2002 by Levy, Lisa

Despite this title-worship, or, perhaps, because of it, Lovell neglects one of the most significant aspects of their lives and their fame: politics. She declares up front that hers is "not a political book," yet concedes that "politics plays a major part" in the stories of the sisters. What's left when politics is subtracted from a family that disintegrated because of extreme political polarization is merely an exploration of the "richness of personalities" among the Mitfords. Thus, reading Lovell to learn about the Mitfords is like getting the news of the day from women's magazines. Yet, The Sisters does provide an introduction to the glamorous world of the Mitfords, and, like flipping through Vogue to discern the skirt lengths this season, there are basics covered in The Sisters that equip the reader for more worthwhile adventures in Mitfordiana.

What salient truths about the Mitfords can we learn from Lovell? Were they rich? Not really, and never ostentatiously so during a very flashy time. Though he did inherit the village of Swinbrook (in Oxfordshire) along with some other property, Lord Redesdale had no talent for making money. Rather, in the classic way of the aristocracy, "He had an uncanny knack for investing at the top of a market, and selling at the bottom." They were better known for their thrift than for being at all profligate. One of the most famous headlines about the Mitfords concerned Lady Redesdale's frugality, "Peeress Saves Ha'pence," was an item in the Daily Sketch that described how forgoing linen napkins netted them a bit extra in the till. They were titled, when titles really meant something, though they wore them lightly, like tiaras rather than sacramental crowns. The "Hons" named in Decca's 1960 memoir Hons and Rebels (Daughters and Rebels in the less title-savvy United States) did not stand for "Honorable" but was the word for hen in the secret language that Decca and Unity devised called Boudledidge. The hens they and their mother famously raised were a major part of life for the Mitfords: Decca was always saving her earned pence for a running-away fund that she eventually used, and Debo helped with the hens' upkeep, selling the eggs to their mother "for a slight profit." Could they be accused of feeding the publicity machine they so despised? Perhaps, but one gets the sense that the Mitfords were celebrities by birth rather than by choice. Nancy was comfortable in the public eye-her younger sisters much less so-and Decca spent much of her life avoiding reporters until she became one, but she chose to be an investigative journalist rather than a society columnist like Nancy. Did they have fabulous love affairs with notorious men, which made for excellent tabloid headlines? Certainly, but they were hardly the Hilton sisters of their day. They were writers, political activists, and vocal critics of the class system, feminists, and international women of mystery.

Given her sense of awe at the foot of the mountain of the Mitford mythology and the unexplicated remark about daughters and dictators, Lovell's overriding query may well be, "What's a nice girl like you, Miss Mitford(s), doing in a world like this?" This romanticism compels Lovell to present the Mitfords as inhabiting a world of their own inside the real world, though they were complicit in this attitude. Lovell passes much too lightly over Lord Redesdale's many prejudices, denoted by Decca as encompassing the following "outsiders": "Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners, but also other people's children, the majority of my older sisters' acquaintances, almost all young men-in fact, the whole teeming population of the earth's surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbors to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking." It's no wonder, then, that the Mitford children grew up isolated from all but a few cousins, especially as only Tom was formally educated (at Eton and Oxford), much to the outrage of both Nancy and Decca, who longed for education outside of the family schoolroom. The girls were permitted various social outlets when they were older, like debutante balls and finishing courses in Paris, mainly to help them find and charm appropriate husbands. Overall, the world of Mitford was a country with sealed borders, where the only legal means of emigration was marriage.