Hons and Rebels: The Mitford Family Memoir (W&N Essentials)

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When war comes it destroys everything, but Linda maintains no regrets. “Don’t pity me,” she tells her best friend and cousin, Fanny. “I’ve had eleven months of perfect and unalloyed happiness, very few people can say that, in the course of long long lives, I imagine.” I am so glad that I finally read this book that's as old as I am, being published in 1960. (My copy isn't that old, it dates from 1962.) It's very instructive to be reminded that youth isn't necessarily wasted on the young. I'm not an enemy of the working class! I think some of them are perfectly sweet!" she retorted angrily. I could almost see the visions of perfectly sweet nannies, grooms, gamekeepers, that the phrase must have conjured up in her mind. Both Diana and Pamela, however, lived out their postwar lives without major incident. They were not, we might say now, really “canceled.” Diana died in 2003 in Paris, aged 93, leaving behind a diamond swastika. Pamela, one of the two quietest Mitford sisters, died in 1994, aged 86, after having spent the last 40 years of her life living on a country estate as the lover of an Italian horsewoman. (Deborah, the other quiet one, married a duke and devoted her life to caring for his stately home.)

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford – a few of my Review: Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford – a few of my

This section of the book I loved, even without the full line-up of Mitfords. We see, for instance, them being dragged around by the Conservative Party –‘Our car was decorated with Tory blue ribbons, and if we should pass a car flaunting the red badge of Socialism, we were allowed to lean out of the window and shout at the occupants: “Down with the horrible Counter-Honnish Labour Party!”.’ We get a child’s-eye-view of the various scandals Nancy causes. Mostly, we get a taste of Decca’s thirst for independence, particularly in her longing to go to school and her storing-up of a Running Away Fund. I really enjoyed this book. One gets a different perspective of the Mitfords, a perspective from within. Jessica tells of her life and her family from her point of view. Events are told with immediacy, with a girlish gush of enthusiasm that feels thoroughly honest, genuine, youthful and engaging. What is truly remarkable about the Mitfords is how such a pinnacle of fame can be built on such a pea of achievement. Nancy deserves to be remembered as an excellent light novelist, Jessica (Decca) as a goodish journalist; Debo will no doubt loom large in future histories of Chatsworth. But we are not talking about the Brontës here, or even the Drabble-Byatts. Mary Lovell claims bizarrely: 'They have now become almost creatures of mythology.' Publicado en 1960, “Nobles y Rebeldes” , es la biografía de Jessica Mitford, quinta de las seis hijas de una familia de la aristocracia inglesa, las cuales han pasado a la historia por sus complejas y escandalosas vidas sentimentales y políticas. Los nombres de las mayorías de ellas se relacionan con el fascismo, siendo Jessica la excepción, pues ella militó en el Partido Comunista y no dudo en escaparse de su casa para acudir a la Guerra Civil Española con quien poco después sería su esposo, Esmond Romilly, sobrino del mismísimo Winston Churchill. La biografía puede dividirse en tres partes: en la primera Jessica nos habla de cómo era su vida familiar y de sus relaciones con sus padres y sus hermanos, hablando también sobre que pasaba en las existencias de la mayoría de sus hermanas. En esta primera parte conocemos como empezaron las inquietudes políticas y sociales de Jessica, como su vida de niña bien en la campiña inglesa termino por resultarle tediosa y aburrida, sintiendo la necesidad de hacer algo más con su vida. En la segunda parte, el foco se centrará más en la Guerra Civil española y lo que Jessica y Esmond vivieron en el frente vasco, además del escándalo que supuso su fuga y los intentos del gobierno inglés y sus familias por hacerles regresar a su patria. La última parte se centrará en la vida de la pareja como casados, hablando de sus problemas económicos en Inglaterra y de su posterior periplo por los Estados Unidos. La biografía terminará con la partida de Esmond al frente para luchar en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Hons and Rebels is a tale of two halves. Its first part describes Jessica’s upbringing at Swinbrook in the Cotswolds, territory familiar to Mitford-lovers from her older sister Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love. All the crucial ingredients of Mitford-lore are present: the vacant mother and booming father, the sisterly teases and the sisters themselves: sharp Nancy, fascist Diana, Nazi Unity, domesticated Pamela, Communist Jessica and country-loving Debo.It’s no secret that I’m a longstanding fan of the Mitfords – or, at least, of reading about them. Debo has an eternal place in my heart, but, even though none of the others quite made it there, I still adored reading the letters between all six sisters. The one whom I didn’t much like (besides Unity, obvs, though her regression after shooting herself is fascinating to see in letter-form) was Jessica. I was chastised. I was told I should read her letters and her books, and that thus I would come to like her more. Finally – FINALLY – I have read Hons and Rebels (1960). Do I like her more? Maybe. I tried reading this book once before, but struggled to get past the sheer selfishness of both Decca and Esmond. When I first read this book I disliked both intensely, despising Esmond for driving a wedge between Decca and her family, and Decca for being so complacent. Odd pursuits, indeed, and little wonder that my mother’s continual refrain was, ‘You’re very silly children.’

Selina Hastings | Jessica Mitford | Slightly Foxed literary

In the early 1980s I began working on my first book, a biography of Nancy Mitford. Four of the six Mitford sisters were then still living, Pamela in the Cotswolds, Diana in Paris with her second husband Sir Oswald Mosley, Debo, wife of the Duke of Devonshire, at Chatsworth, and Jessica, always known as ‘Decca’, with her family in California. Throughout my research Pam, Diana and Debo were immensely kind and helpful, all of them possessed of great charm and a slightly idiosyncratic sense of humour. They invited me to stay, gave me access to hundreds of letters, and mined for my benefit lucid memories of their early lives and of their family and friends. I fell in love with her right then and there. I felt the same way. Jesus, racism, and conservative politics made me nauseated, as they did my eldest sister.Mitford] has a most unusual talent for recapturing the past….There is a feeling of immediacy, as if it were all being written on the spot, at the time, by the teen-ager it was happening to. It is a fascinating book.”

The new Pursuit of Love TV show means it’s time to - Vox

So it should be very exciting to read the story of her growing up. Jessica had a very large family, and her sisters were all just as notorious and exciting as she was in different ways. But not all of them were as smart about the world. Diana fell in love with Oswald Moseley, the English fascist, and was ostracized from polite society as a traitor for most of her life. Unity's fate was even more horrific, she fell in love with Adolph Hitler, became a fanatical "Jew-hater" (in her own words) and then tried to kill herself when England declared war on Nazi Germany. In a ghastly accident, the bullet lodged in her head and she became permanently brain-damaged, only to die several years later. It was becoming rather apparent by this year of 1935 that not all of us were turning out quite according to plan,’ writes Jessica Mitford in this brilliantly funny and perceptive account of growing up as the fifth of the six notoriously headstrong Mitford sisters. And it was perhaps Jessica – always known as Decca – the lifelong hard-line socialist, who turned out least ‘according to plan’ of them all. Diana, too, was devoted to Nazism. She married Mosley in 1936 in Joseph Goebbels’s living room, with Hitler a guest of honor. In 1940, after the war broke out, she was arrested for her ties to Hitler and would spend three years in prison, then remain under house arrest until the end of the war. I have to say that my favourite parts of the book were describing her childhood, to me that was where she sparkled the most. Although I did feel that if she had not acted like a petulant child and taught herself-if she had wanted to learn about things and study further she could have taught herself, my grandmother did that-I also think she would have enjoyed herself more...but I digress this is not a space for me to criticize her childhood. Unity invented a tragic story involving a Pekingese puppy. ‘The telephone bell rang,’ it went. ‘Grandpa got up from his seat and went to answer it. “Lill ill!” he cried . . .’ Lill was on her deathbed, a victim of consumption. Her dying request was that Grandpa should care for her poor little Pekingese. However, in all the excitement of the funeral, the Peke was forgotten, and was found several days later beside his mistress’s grave, dead of starvation and a broken heart.So, are you sitting comfortably, kiddies? Let's start again from the beginning. There's Muv and Farve - Lord Redesdale and his long-suffering wife, Sydney - whose eccentricities we know from Diana's The Pursuit of Love and Jessica's Hons and Rebels. Farve is famous for his temper tantrums and shouting 'Sewer!' at his daughters' boyfriends. Muv is famous for being dotty and believing that 'the Good Body' cures itself; her children have some close shaves with appendicitis. The children consist of six daughters, from Diana the eldest to Debo the youngest, with a son, Tom, somewhere in the middle. Hons and Rebels, originally published in the United States under the title Daughters and Rebels, [1] is a 1960 autobiography by political activist Jessica Mitford, which describes her aristocratic childhood and the conflicts between her and her sisters Unity and Diana, who were ardent supporters of Nazism. 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. Unity befriended Nazi leader Hitler, [3] who praised her as an ideal of Aryan beauty. The Mitfords were a family of very minor English aristocrats who nonetheless became the center of the so-called Mitford industry in England from the 1930s on. There are Mitford documentaries, Mitford biographies, even a Mitford musical. Their scandalous escapades seemed to function as the reality TV drama of their era, even as they made real political and artistic contributions to the world. Diana was arrested, in part, because of Nancy, who informed on her Nazi sisters to the British authorities. “She is a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and admirer of Hitler and sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy in general,” Nancy told MI5 of Diana. Nancy also warned authorities of her sister Pamela, whom Nancy said was a virulent anti-Semite. Pamela and her husband, Nancy wrote, “had been heard to declare a) that all Jews in England should be killed and b) that the war should be stopped now ‘before we lose any more money.’” I was expecting a biography of the eccentric Mitford childhood we (mostly) all know well. The sort of thing we found in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love– with the hons in the cupboard, the father hunting the children, and the various codes. Spoilers: it is not. We do see some of Decca’s childhood – but by the time she was around in the nursery, her older siblings were more or less adults. Just Unity, Debo, and Decca were left around – and it is the three of them who formed various bonds and antipathies.

Rereading: Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford review — a

Such is the enormous charm of the Love duology that it has powered an entire industry of fascination with the Mitfords — the charm of those novels, and the political extremes of the world in which they were produced. The past decade of political polarization shows no sign of abating, and it continues to turn not just countries but families against each other. Once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters are becoming once-a-decade disasters in the wake of catastrophic climate change. The world is fundamentally reorganizing itself before our eyes, and in such a destabilizing moment, there is something useful in looking at a family who found its world, too, shifting and changing in ways none of them could have predicted. And who exemplifies that situation better than the Mitfords?Si tengo que ser totalmente sincera, más que por interés real por lo que cuenta, escogí este libro para poder comparar la forma de escribir de Jessica Mitord con la de su hermana Nancy, una autora que me encanta cómo escribe y cuyas novelas disfruto totalmente. Y, para que mentir, por la curiosidad de leer sobre las estrafalarias hermanas Mitford y sus polémicas vidas. Pero al final eso no ha sido lo decisivo para que esta lectura me haya agradado tanto. La historia de Jessica es realmente apasionante y adictiva. Fue una mujer increíblemente valiente; ejemplo claro de lo que es hacerse a uno mismo con todas sus consecuencias, sean buenas o malas. Occasionally Unity and I joined in the forbidden sport of ‘teasing Debo’. The teasing had to be done well out of earshot of my father, as Debo was his prime favourite, and fearful consequences could follow if we made her cry. She was an extraordinarily softhearted child, and it was easy to make her huge blue eyes brim with tears – known as ‘welling’ in family circles. Sometimes we would barricade with chairs and stage pitched battles, throwing books and records until Nanny came to tell us to stop the noise. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-05-16 14:05:26 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA1161806 City London Donor