The Mitford sisters never really go anywhere—they are all dead, so perhaps a difficult task. After close to a century of tabloid features on one or all six of them, the youngest and last surviving died in 2014 at age 94. Still, every now and then, there is a flurry of new, or renewed, interest in the Mitford girls. And why not? They were beautiful, aristocratic, and wild. Their associations and affairs are the stuff of 20th-century-history exams. Just now, a Mitford revival has been sparked by the excellent adaptation of the eldest sister’s popular postwar novel The Pursuit of Love. Nancy was the writer. Pamela, the “boring” one, as Tina Brown described in a New York Times review of a 2016 group biography. Then there was Diana, known first as a great beauty of her generation, then as the fascist. Unity, the Nazi. Jessica, the Communist, and then the journalist. Finally, Deborah, the duchess. Little wonder that the family dynamics dominated newspaper headlines for decades starting in the 1920s, when Nancy and Diana were debutantes, prominent among the cast of Bright Young Things. (The Wikipedia entry for that phrase is a lengthy chart detailing who among the group is lightly fictionalized as whom in the books they all wrote about one another.)
The Mitfords are usually written about as a pack, though it’s Nancy who is most responsible for the enduring Mitford mythology, thanks not only to the success of the semi-autobiographical account of their eccentric childhood in The Pursuit of Love, but also to her letters, which she left behind in the thousands. As the eldest child (a lone brother Tom was killed in action in 1945), Nancy’s teasing humor shaped the vocabulary that’s come to be recognized as “Mitfordian.” She is said to have invented most of the elaborate, extensive nicknames for the family and their large group of famous friends. The anthologies of letters between the sisters should come with those decoder rings that used to be hidden inside cereal boxes. Charlotte Mosley, editor of The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, estimates in her editor’s note that their correspondence consisted of a total of 12,000 letters. The volume, which includes just a fraction of them, begins with an incomplete index of nicknames. It is two pages long.
In both her letters and her books—eight novels and four biographies—Nancy is the same Nancy—honest, sly, witty, sometimes cruel. A loyal friend who tempers unpleasant truths with English pragmatism and an appreciation for life’s absurdities. Of cooking and housework, Mitford has the newly married heroine of The Pursuit of Love complain, “But oh how dreadful it is, cooking.… I don’t wonder people sometimes put their heads in [the oven] and leave them in out of sheer misery. Oh, dear, I wish you could have seen the Hoover running away with me.… I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.” Of the drudgery incurred by even a happy marriage, the novel’s narrator Fanny sulks at how her husband “will always use my tooth-paste and will always squeeze the tube in the middle.” Fanny’s mother is blessed with perhaps the funnest moniker in all of literature: Unable to commit to any relationship, she is referred to and addressed as “the Bolter.”
On the literary podcast Backlisted, Laura Thompson, the author of The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters and Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford, noted that Nancy’s “books read like an enchantingly clever woman telling stories down the telephone.” Her friend Evelyn Waugh put it only slightly differently in a letter: “The charm of your writing depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.” Her books manage to pull off the trick all writers dream of doing: inspiring cult fanaticism, whispered about between those who really get it (true Hons!), while also becoming hugely successful. When The Pursuit of Love was published in 1945, it sold 200,000 copies within the first year. She followed it up with a triumphant sequel, Love in a Cold Climate. Both books have been adapted for television multiple times. In addition to the recent adaptation with Lily James as lovestruck Linda Radlett, there’s a 2001 series starring Rosamund Pike (somehow cast as her wallflower cousin Fanny), and a Judi Dench–led miniseries from 1980.
That her most popular novels are basically autofiction is no secret. In an old black-and-white interview, rebroadcast in the 1980 BBC documentary Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by Her Sisters, Nancy speaks with pride about portraying her parents “exact” as the characters Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie. In letters between her and Waugh (by some accounts one of her best friends and her one-time flatmate, along with his first wife also named Evelyn), she complains that Jessica’s 1960 autobiography, the beloved and enchanting Hons and Rebels, is inspired more by her novels than Jessica’s memory. Between bits of gossip and insults about Jessica’s first husband Esmond Romilly, Nancy wrote to Waugh, “In some respects she has seen the family, quite without knowing it herself, through the eyes of my books.… I haven’t said this to anybody but you as it sounds so conceited. Esmond was the most horrible human being I have ever met.”
Mitford’s merciless skewering of the upper classes, tempered by a fondness for prewar Britain, characterizes all of her novels. Her first, Highland Fling, is a light satire of a house party at a grand, haunted castle, published when she was in her 20s. She claims to have written it because she needed money and wanted to earn 100 pounds. While it is said that she grew to dislike it, not uncommon among writers, it’s considered another classic of the era. Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, wrote the foreword to the 2013 Vintage reissue, and it’s not hard to see the influence of Nancy’s oeuvre, and her life, on his writing. Her books are filled with debutantes, dinner gongs, and governesses. Her parents were meant to be on the Titanic, Thompson writes in Life in a Cold Climate. (They cancelled.) Unpleasant truths are at least well-dressed and served with an effervescent cocktail.
As interviewed in the 1980 BBC documentary, the remaining sisters are fascinating to watch. It seems as if Nancy may have held them together. We see Pamela feeding her prize chickens in argyle socks and a Barbour jacket. Jessica, at her California craftsman in front of a clunky typewriter. Debo, in a firelit sitting room of the historic estate she presided over as the duchess of Devonshire; Chatsworth is both mentioned by name in Pride and Prejudice and used as Mr. Darcy’s home in the 1995 and 2005 adaptations. Diana, still beautiful and astonishingly unrepentant. In the biggest scandal of her day, she left her husband, the young, attractive heir to the Guinness fortune, for the preeminent fascist in Britain, the married Sir Oswald Mosley. The younger sisters were forbidden to see Diana—because of her divorcée status and not her politics, according to Thompson. She was considered a security threat during World War II, and spent three years in prison.
She was not a moralist (a friend’s grandmother once accused her of hosting an orgy and kicked her out of the house), but Nancy herself, along with Jessica, were the only members of their immediate family to have refused to meet with Hitler, Thompson writes. One of Nancy’s early novels, Wigs on the Green, published in 1935, is a satire of British fascism, of Diana and Unity’s support for it, and of Diana’s eventual husband, Mosley. Writing before the book’s publication, Diana begged Nancy to remove the parts of the book that criticize British fascism, and, specifically, Diana, Unity, and Mosley. Nancy refused. (She called Mosley “Sir Ogre” to her other sisters, and Mosley refused to let Nancy in their home in England after he and Diana were married, Thompson recounts.) In fact, Nancy was called upon by the Home Office to inform on Diana during the war, and Nancy obliged, per Thompson. (Nancy also told the Foreign Office her sister was an “extremely dangerous person.”) Having done her duty to her country, she may have felt she had to do her duty as a sister, writing to imprisoned Diana, extolling in breathless wonder her luck at finding a Guerlain lipstick at a shop during the Blitz. Like Linda in The Pursuit of Love, she went to France to aid refugees of the Spanish Civil War, volunteered as a driver in London during air raids, and described her personal politics as “vaguely socialist.”
Whether she is thought of as a snob, which she undoubtedly was, as one of the pack of sisters, or as the author of frivolous love stories, her letters and books show her trying to understand exactly how beloved siblings and parents turn into adults one might not recognize with the most of horrific politics. Harold Acton, her close friend, emphasizes in a biography of her how the children were “clannishly devoted to each other.” Nancy’s postwar reconciliation with Diana is little written about, possibly since so many of the anthologies of letters and biographies seem to be compiled or sanctioned by the Mosleys. The Acton biography includes a foreword by ever-unrepentant Diana. Of their sister Unity, who shot herself when Britain declared war on Germany, Jessica once wrote, “Why had she, to those of us who knew her the most human of people, turned her back on humanity?” Jessica refused to have anything to do with Diana, meeting her for the first time in decades only after Nancy fell ill in the last years of her life, according to The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters.
Nancy moved to France after the war. Like her heroine Linda, she fell in love with a Frenchman. She began writing historical biographies on both grand and overlooked figures in history, an early trendsetter paving the way for the readable, stylized biography. The Sun King; Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV; Frederick the Great. As ever, she is herself on the page, witty and preoccupied with love and class. The most interesting of these biographies might be Voltaire in Love, a biography of a relationship between two brilliant minds. Possibly Nancy’s ultimate fantasy.
Nancy didn’t want a cross to appear on her gravestone, thinking the symbol one of violence, according to Thompson. Instead, a mole has been carved like the one she had printed atop her writing paper. If she had a religion, it would be laughter. Thompson writes in Life in a Cold Climate, “Nancy’s most fervently expressed belief [was] that nothing in the world matters more than jokes. For her, laughter came to have an intrinsic worth.” Jessica recalls in Hons and Rebels watching her eldest sister write Highland Fling in fits of giggles. It makes perfect sense that we return to Nancy in times of uncertainty, just as postwar readers flocked to The Pursuit of Love. In the latest adaptation, written and directed by Emily Mortimer, who also looks to be having the time of her life playing the Bolter, half the fun is spotting details from Nancy’s personal letters and life. As much as I enjoy her novels, my favorite piece of Nancy’s writing is an economical nine words long. It’s both matter of fact and tongue in cheek, and captures something of her philosophy. Possibly inspired by her friend Waugh (their correspondence about fan mail is very funny), she had cards printed to use as needed with the words: “Nancy Mitford is unable to do as you ask.”
