Unity and Deborah were Nazi supporters Unity, the more viscerally disturbing of the two, had a close relationship with Hitler. Which is to say I came to this autobiography without any knowledge of many of the family’s far-right extremist political ideologies ripe for an historic time. Isolation seems a root cause for why most of the sisters’ ideologies ran wild. Jessica the most distressed about missing the intellectual stimulation of teachers and yearning for friends and people from different walks of life. They weren’t allowed to have friends, only within their own kind – cousins, aunts, and uncles.

(He boarded at Eton and then fought in WWII in Burma, so he’s mostly out of the picture. All the sisters were kept cloistered as they weren’t allowed to attend school outside the manor, only adored Tom was. Starting with rigid rules and boundaries. “It has the “look of frankly institutional architecture,” she says of the manor, resembling a “private lunatic asylum.” For many of the real characters who dwell inside – the Mitford parents and four of the sisters depicted, it’s a rather “eccentric” place. The creamy-yellow stone that makes the Cotswolds a tourist destination is not the cozy image of the homes in the area nor in Jessica’s eyes. Asthall Manor Houseīy Vieve Forward via Wikimedia Commons A large family, including a brother Tom nicknamed Tuddemy, and those who served the “Ruling Class,” governesses who didn’t last long and a long-time Nanny, all living in a Downton-esque estate, Asthall Manor in the county of Oxfordshire, minus the charm. Sometimes playful, witty, though mostly in the early sections growing up in an “old and quaint” small village, Swinbrook, in “Cotswold country,” in the British countryside outside of London. Nicknames and capitalizing phrases with a mocking tone abound. Originally published in 1960, reproduced in this handsome, limited edition by Slightly Foxed, a London bookshop and publisher I had the pleasure of stumbling upon during pandemic armchair browsing.ĭecca intended the epithet to be disdainful of her landed gentry “eccentric” family, headed by 2 nd Baron and Lady Redesdale, dubbed Farve and Muv.

A “defiantly radical author and journalist,” says British literary biographer Selina Hastings in her introduction to Hons and Rebels, which reflects how Jessica Mitford’s breakout rebellious autobiography reads. Why a scandalous early-20 th century British family spawned a cottage industry still thriving (Cotswolds, England, Paris, and Spain 1920s to 1939): I’m a latecomer to the “Mitford Industry.” A pet phrase coined by one of the six Mitford sisters, Jessica nicknamed Decca, fifth youngest.

Hons and rebels review