Rich man, poor man, communist, facist

At the beginning, it was rather like a bizarre round of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’. Decca ran away to the Spanish civil war; Unity went to Munich and made friends with Hitler; Diana bolted with the founder of English Fascism and then went to prison; Pamela stayed at home; Debo ended up with Chatsworth; and Nancy wrote some very good books. The Mitford sisters’ fame originated, mostly, in newspaper scandals of the 1930s, to the horror of their parents, who believed that a gentlewoman’s name should appear in newspapers only twice, on her marriage and on her death. (According to Decca, Lady Redesdale grew to dread the sight of the words ‘Peer’s Daughter’ in newsprint, as well she might.)

They did unusually interesting things between them, and their lives often seem to reduce the passions of the 1930s to a disconcertingly human level. ‘Poor sweet Führer, he’s having such a dreadful time,’ Unity writes at one point. The ongoing general fascination with the six of them, which I happily admit to sharing, comes from the unforgettable image of Jessica and Unity in childhood dividing the schoolroom at Swinbrook with their different ideological territories, alternating Red Front choruses and the Horst Wessel Lied on the phonograph. There is, too, the inscrutable figure of Diana, who sometimes seems, by her much remarked beauty and alarming public utterances on the subject of Hitler right up to the end of her life, to hold the larger historical explanation of quite why it was that Fascism in England never got anywhere. Hitler thought that Mosley had made the mistake of importing the foreign-sounding ‘Blackshirts’ and would have done better to call his movement the ‘Ironsides’; he was probably right, but we can all be grateful for Mosley’s mistake.

Other people ran away to the Spanish civil war; other people’s husbands founded political parties of cranky extremism which led to nothing very much.