For the young Mitfords growing up at Swinbrook, the hideous, cold Cotswold house built by Lord Redesdale (‘Farve’), life was isolated and stiflingly uneventful, revolving around the church, the Conservative Party and Farve’s occasional dyspeptic excursions to the House of Lords. In our era of confessional tell-all there is something refreshing about this, and the austerity of Jessica Mitford’s narrative of loss renders it painfully moving.

Hons and Rebels | The BMJ Hons and Rebels | The BMJ

Jessica Mitford (1917–1996) was the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, and she and her five sisters and one brother grew up in isolation on their parents’ Cotswold estate. Four of the six Mitford sisters were then still living, Pamela in the Cotswolds, Diana in Paris with her second. The war profoundly divided the Mitfords, Unity and Diana passionately proFranco, while Decca immediately became a committed Loyalist, determined somehow to leave England and join the fight in Spain. The feeling I got from the letters, that she rather abandoned them, is quietly reflected here – not by what she says about them, but by the fact that they are seldom mentioned. Of these six Mitford sisters, three became Nazis, one became a socialist journalist, one a liberal satirical novelist who informed on her Nazi sisters, and one a duchess.

Locked into a ‘conspiracy of two against the world’, the pair of them made their way to Bilbao, where Esmond found work typing dispatches for an English newspaper. The only reason I didn’t love Hons and Rebels as much as I could have done is because I was expecting something else – I missed hearing about the rest of the family (who are more or less absent for the second half of the book), and wondered quite what they were thinking about her. Tis now 12:30 on the first day I was to really work all day on the book,’ she reported to her husband and daughter in May 1959.

Hons and Rebels – New York Review Books

By the time I finished Letters Between Six Sisters, I felt I’d had more than enough (probably because once Nancy and Decca died, the letters were almost entirely Debo and Diana).Unity insisted on being 'finished' in Munich instead of in Paris like her sisters, and hung around the Osteria Bavaria until she caught Hitler's eye. Jessica was a supporter of Communism and eloped with her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, to fight with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, [2] and Diana grew up to marry Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.