Mitford sisters' world, The

Radical Society, Apr 2002 by Levy, Lisa

Though the genteel Lovell would never say it, surely the Mitford girls' willingness to cleave to dictators derives from the notion that they made the best liberators. Each of their first marriages, on the whole, was disastrous and short-lived. Through a potent cocktail of sheer force of will and cleverness in a time when single women still required chaperons even to go shopping, Nancy became one of the charter members of the Bright Young Things. Though her suitors proved fascists only in matters of aesthetics, in the timeless manner of youth cultures they had definite ideas about the way things should be done. Unhappily married after a broken engagement at the ripe age of 28 to the ineffectual Peter Rodd (known as "Prod" among the family)-a gambler, a drunk, a philanderer, and an all-around upper-class prat-she moved to Paris in 1945 to be closer to the womanizing Colonel Palewski, with whom she had fallen "headlong, obsessionally" in love in 1942. Nancy wrote several well-received books about French history following her career as a novelist, but happiness (in Lovell's marriage-and-children sense) eluded her; even after divorcing Rodd her position in relation to her beloved Palewski was as a "supplicant" for "crumbs of his affection." Pamela also married late, and chose Derek Jackson, a scientist; they divorced on friendly terms after World War II. She never remarried; he made a habit of it, marrying seven more times. Beautiful Diana, "generally acknowledged in the family as `the only one of us who had a face,' fell in love with the married, "enfant terrible" head of the British fascist movement, Oswald Mosley, in 1931. She divorced her first husband, brewing heir Bryan Guinness, after three years of marriage in order to be with the charismatic promiscuous politician. As a teenager Unity had boasted to Decca, "I'm going to Germany to meet Hitler." Despite this girlish enthusiasm, Lovell vigorously rejects the characterization of Unity as some sort of "Hitler groupie," and it's probably the case that the Mitford and the Fuhrer never shared anything more than friendship. Communist Decca ran off to fight the fascists in Spain with her cousin, Esmond Romilly, in 1937, whom she married in a great scandal; the Romillys moved to America together, where Decca had a long career as a leftist agitator and journalist. Debo was the happy exception to the unhappy Mitford marriage rule: she correctly predicted that one day a duke would come and make her a duchess. She married Andrew Cavendish, who was the Duke of Chatsworth, and has spent her life raising children and keeping his illustrious manor.

Ultimately, what's striking about the Mitfords is what Lovell fails to notice: how eager they were to abandon the holy trinity of England, aristocracy, and family. The fact is that the sisters lived together in various family manses for a fairly brief time-- Nancy was sixteen and already restless when Debo was born, and the world intervenes in Mitfordiana early and often-but the destruction of Lovell's illusions is a business impervious to chronology or, for that matter, reality. Her fantasy of the Mitfords was very much informed by Nancy's two popular novels that foregrounded the Mitford children, The Pursuit of Love (1945), and a sequel of sorts, Love in a Cold Climate (1949). Though the family was renamed the Radletts, a decidedly Mitford mania was spurred by Nancy's works, testament to both her skill as a writer and her personal charisma. These novels also planted the characters of the Mitford parents, called Muv and Farve, as aristocratic eccentrics in the public imagination, especially the comically tyrannical Farve.