This is the second of my two pieces for Exeposé Books. It's a re-jig of a piece I had already written on the Mitford sisters (yes, them again), but they're some of my favourite people to read and write about and so I hope you'll forgive me for bringing them up again!
For those who don't spend their time with their nose in endless books about the inconceivably crazy antics of minor aristocrats (who doesn't?), the Mitfords were a family whose lives were full of outrageous coincidences. Their story would be thought of as highly unrealistic at the very least; the Mitfords' parents, by some act of fate, missed their journey on the maiden voyage of the Titanic and their fifth child, the infamous Nazi-lover Unity, was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika - and given the middle name Valkyrie. Add into the mix their family connections to Winston Churchill as well as the current Royal Family, and they could be the creation of an over-zealous writer.
There were seven Mitford children in all, including a brother, Tom, who was sadly consigned to obscurity, despite his scandalous schooldays at Eton. It would be Tom's six sisters - Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah - who would go down in history, or perhaps in infamy.
The latest work about this strange sextet is Lyndsy Spence’s The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life, published in August 2013. In the midst of such a wealth of existing writing about and by the sisters, Spence is challenged with creating an original and entertaining version of their story. Her idea of portraying theMitfords’ lives through a guide to English high society in the middle years of the twentieth century, is a fun and novel one, and we learn how the girls might have coped with modern life. Pamela's guide to throwing a jubilee party, Nancy's guide to fashion or Diana's tips on how to stay young all feature in this endearing compendium. It’s far from a laborious, detailed biography, but this was always supposed to be a clean, informal glance at the Mitfords’ lives.
Aside from Unity, who died in 1948 after earlier attempting suicide in a Munich park at the outbreak of the Second World War, each of the sisters has published her memoirs. Jessica’sHons and Rebels and Deborah’s Wait For Me are two of the most loved by the ever-growing number of twenty-first century Mitford fans. Meanwhile, Nancy is best remembered for her novels Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love.
It was in contemporary British popular culture, though, that the elder sisters would first find fame with their well-known friends, the earliest set of Bright Young People. Rushing around London, falling into and out of the most over-the-top fancy dress parties, cocktails in hand, the young inter-war generation lived fast and partied hard. After Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited and observer of these wild antics, separated from his wife, he became obsessed with Diana and even dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to her. The novel went on to be adapted by Stephen Fry into the film Bright Young Things in 2003.
In spite of their polarising reputations and decadent lifestyles, in her 2001 biography The Mitford Girls – The Biography of An Extraordinary Family, biographer Mary S Lovell is at pains to emphasise that the women always stuck together. Despite a wide age gap - Nancy, the eldest, was sixteen when her youngest sister Debo was born - they remained close throughout their lives, perhaps even more so in adulthood than they had been as children. An abridged and condensed collection of their vast number of letters was edited by Diana’s daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley –Letters Between Six Sisters is a hefty volume, but it captures a version of the women very rarely glimpsed, even in their memoirs. Their letters portray an obvious love of life and vivacious nature which would characterise them as much as their infamous deeds.
Perhaps the reason that many are still so absorbed in the sisters' unique stories – even after the publication of innumerable biographies, memoirs and homages such as Spence’s – is that the Mitfords were such vibrant, interesting people. Yes, they were hugely flawed, of course; what with their associations with the far-right and some certainly questionable morals, they were not exactly salubrious company. But every biographer appears so in awe of them and portrays each of their lives in such a way that it is impossible to avoid being swept along with them, through the débutantedances, the summer tours of Europe, the wild parties of inter-war London. Maybe it is because their lives are so incomprehensible and far-moved from our own that generation after generation is drawn to their fantastical stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment