Mitford sisters' world, The

Radical Society, Apr 2002 by Levy, Lisa

In Nancy's own most notable Noblesse Oblige essay, "The English Artistocracy," there is a telling line, stuck in the original inside parentheses: "Heiresses have caused the extinction of as well as the enrichment of many an English family, since the heiress, who must be an only child if she is to be really rich, often comes of barren or enfeebled stock." Nancy herself was precisely not this type of heiress, but was at the end of the Mitford line, strictly speaking, since Tom did not produce any heirs. The Mitfords proper are now extinct, a natural consequence of a family overrun with daughters. Waugh, in his characteristic response to Nancy's essay, teased her about being a "class agitatrix," adding, in the wake of the commotion her essay caused, "There are some subjects too intimate for print. Surely class is one?" But Nancy and her sisters had effectively escaped their class when they became headline fodder: except for Debo, who traded up for an even better title, none of them were particularly "Honorable" for quite some time. Furthermore, was her class really more intimate, one wonders, than her family, which Nancy and Decca, the most talented Mitfords, used as raw material for many years, and others, including Lovell, have now come to pillage. The fascination with the Mitfords lies in the unraveling of this matrix of class and familial intimacy, that by knowing them well one might know upper-class England at its height and in its decline. In the end, the Mitfords were a microcosm and a utopia, a family at once invaded by world-historical forces and mockingly impervious to them.

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Girls, Mary Lovell. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. 384pp.

Additional bibliography (first publication followed by edition used)

Mitford, Jessica. Hons and Rebels (Victor Golancz, 1960). In the United States: Daughters and Rebels (Houghton Mifflin, 1960).

- A Fine Old Conflict (1977; Vintage Books, 1978).

- The American Way of Death Revisited (1963; Vintage Books, 2000).

- Poison Penmanship (1979; Vintage Books, 1980). Mitford, Nancy. The Pursuit ofLove and Love in a Cold

Climate (1945, 1949; Modern Library, 1994).

- The Blessing (Hamish Hamilton 1951; Penguin, 1957).

- Madame de Pompadour (1953; New York Review of Books, 2001).

- ed., Noblesse Oblige (Hamish Hamilton 1956; Penguin, 1959).

Mosley, Diana Mitford. A Life of Contrasts (Hamish Hamilton, 1977).

Waugh, Evelyn. Vile Bodies (1930; Chapman and Hall, 1965).