At a certain point, the sisters became aware of the value of their letters and of the possibility that they might one day be published. In 1963, Nancy advised Deborah to throw nothing away because the correspondence of a whole family would be ‘gold for your heirs’. Pamela, who until then had discarded most of her letters, began to preserve them, and Jessica started keeping carbon copies of her correspondence in the 1950s. It is nevertheless abundantly clear that the sisters did not write with an eye to posterity; the frankness, immediacy and informal style of their communications bear this out. Only when I had begun editing these letters did the idea of publication at times inhibit the two surviving sisters. A few months before she died in 2003, Diana wrote to Deborah, ‘I’ve started this letter and for the first time in my life I can’t think of anything to say. My old mind is a blank. If this had happened sooner it would have saved Charlotte a lot of trouble.’ Happily, it did not.
1 Love From Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993); Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y. Sussman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).
The Mitford sisters first began to make headlines in the late 1920s and have rarely been out of the news since. Between them they were close to many key figures of the last century. They knew Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Hitler; were friends of Lytton Strachey, Evelyn Waugh and Maya Angelou; sat for Augustus John, Lucian Freud and Cecil Beaton; entertained the Queen, the Duchess of Windsor and Katherine Graham; were guests of Lord Berners, Goebbels and Givenchy. They lived out their lives in very different spheres, from the London of the Bright Young Things, pre-war Munich and cosmopolitan Paris, to rural Ireland, left-wing California and the deep English countryside.
How did these six sisters, offspring of parents whose highest hopes for their daughters were that they should make good wives, achieve such fame? Some clues can be found in the personalities and careers of their forebears. Talent often misses a generation and the sisters’ grandfathers on both sides of the family were notable in their day. Bertram Mitford, the 1st Baron Redesdale, was a diplomat, politician and author. His memoirs were admired by Edmund Gosse and his collection of popular Japanese stories, Tales of Old Japan, is still in print today. The Mitfords’ maternal grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles, was a politician and journalist who started the popular weekly satirical magazine Vanity Fair (unrelated to its modern namesake) and The Lady, founded in 1883 and still famous for its classified columns advertising for domestic help. A combative and opinionated self-made man, Bowles used Vanity Fair and his position as a Member of Parliament as weapons to bring down his opponents. Never afraid of saying what he thought, he relished being a gadfly to the Establishment and engaged in a constant guerrilla warfare of press campaigns and court cases. His energy, wit and what The Times described as a ‘temperamental dislike of compromise’ passed down in generous measure to his granddaughters, who also inherited his interest in politics and a gift for writing.
While the sisters’ enduring reputation owes much to their originality, forceful opinions, and good looks, the turbulent times in which they grew up provided the catalyst for their highly publicized exploits. The decade leading up to the Second World War was one of ideological extremes and, like many of their contemporaries, they were drawn to radical politics which they saw as the answer to Europe’s ills. Their beliefs spanned the political spectrum, from fascism, Nazism and communism, to socialism, Gaullism and Conservatism, politics dividing the family as surely as religion had done in former centuries, political absolutism replacing religious absolutes. The causes they took up were closely connected with the men who embodied them, with the difference that Unity and Jessica chose men whose politics corresponded with their own natural ideological tendencies, while Nancy and Diana’S political beliefs were sustained by the men they loved.
For a family that is regarded as quintessentially English it is interesting that all the sisters, except Deborah, spent much of their lives abroad. Consciously or unconsciously, the desire to set themselves apart from their siblings, to stand out as individuals and not just as one of the ‘Mitford girls’, drove them not only into opposite political camps but also to different parts of the world. What the sisters shared, however, was stronger than that which divided them. In spite of their differences, and however little their daily lives might have in common, they needed to keep in touch; recounting their lives to each other was a vital part of their existence. Only Jessica broke this chain by completely severing ties with Diana before the war, when political antipathy replaced her childhood love for her ‘favourite person in the world’, and when too much bitterness made meeting on the basis of sisterly fondness ‘unthinkable’.
A family correspondence of this scope and size is rare; for it to include four such gifted writers makes it unique. Nancy, Diana, Jessica and Deborah were all published authors, their books international bestsellers that are mostly still in print. Even Unity, whose suicide attempt effectively cut off her development in her mid-twenties, and Pamela, who was slowed down by a bout of childhood polio, wrote with natural, distinctive voices.
Eighty years separate the earliest surviving letter between the sisters – a note written in 1923 by nine-year-old Unity, who was on a seaside holiday in Sussex, to thirteen-year-old Diana who had stayed at home – and the last – a fax sent in 2003 by 83-year-old Deborah from her home in England to 93-year-old Diana who was dying in Paris. The letters began as a trickle while the sisters were still living at home, swelled in number in the 1930s as they gradually went out into the world, and reached a flood after the war when they setfled in different countries and saw each other less often. Although they started using the telephone in the 1950s – Diana and Deborah used to ring regularly on Sunday mornings and when Nancy and Diana were both living in France they spoke almost daily – telephoning remained of secondary importance; letters were their principal means of keeping in touch. The post and everything that touched on it played a key part in their lives: Jessica left $5,000 in her will to her local postman; Deborah’s idea of contentment in old age was to be the postmistress of a small village; and at the end of her life Diana was reconciled to moving from a house and garden in the suburbs to a flat in Paris mainly because it was situated immediately above a post office. While the sisters’ correspondence with one another represents just a fraction of their total output – they rarely left a letter unanswered and kept up with many hundreds of other correspondents – it is unique because it was sustained over a lifetime.
The strength of feeling amongst the sisters was intense: childhood love, sympathy, generosity and loyalty were mixed with hate, envy, resentment and exasperation – sentiments that remained with them to a greater or lesser extent throughout their lives and give their letters to one another an adolescent quality which persists even in old age. During their childhood, alliances were formed and broken, common enemies fought then sided with. As they grew up, politics hardened their positions and determined which camp they chose to support. In a family where overt demonstrations of love were avoided and where the English upper-class code of frowning on any public display of emotion was observed, teasing was a relatively safe way of dealing with sibling rivalry and of expressing affection. The joking relationship between them acted as a safeguard, creating an environment in which tensions could be defused before they grew too serious. Nancy, as the eldest, was usually the instigator of these practices which she carried on even in later life, partly in commemoration of schoolroom custom but also