Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4525 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 830 pages

Review
'"The Mitfords" are all competitively exasperating!but slowly, cumulatively, as age and death are stared gallantly in the eye, I ended in tears.' The Guardian 'The letters are all compulsively readable!and have a funny, sharp and stylish freshness that suggests they could have just pinged into your inbox'.' The Times Pick of the Week '"The Mitfords" is a thrilling and moving, funny and serious book. Here is a story of a family, of loyalty, love, humour, tragedy and at times, chilling deception, a tale that sometimes amuses and horrifies, but always fascinates!with the diminishing use of the letter as a means of communication, one wonders if there will ever again be such a luminous correspondence.' Telegraph 'Charlotte Mosley's glorious collection -- by turns hilarious, moving and shocking -- should be read by both detractors and admirers, because these letters are social history, pure and simple.' Waterstones Books Quarterly 'This is a long book which gets better and better as you proceed, the genius of it being in its gathering momentum!As editor, (Charlotte Mosley's) quiet rigour and fearlessness of skeletons both in and out of cupboards must be saluted!one is aware of having read something not only unique but very moving too!' The Express 'Bright, intimate and moving correspondence'. Telegraph

Times, Pick of the Week
`The letters are all compulsively readable...funny, sharp and stylish...they could have just pinged into your inbox.'

Telegraph
'Bright, intimate and moving correspondence.'

Customer Reviews

A truly wonderful read - I'd like to give it 6 stars!
"Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters," is a truly wonderful read. I have just finished the 800-plus pages and wish very much that there were 800 more. I'd like to give it 6 stars, but dear old Amazon (whose price is a giveaway £14.95 instead of the RRP of £25.00) only permits one to praise to a point. I willingly go beyond that point and any buyer who is a little hesitant about getting the book for Christmas and/or adding more copies to the order for the rellies that are loved or hated - both types will appreciate it, even if they can't or couldn't stand the Mitford 'girls' - should go ahead right away.

I have read somewhere that Charlotte Mosley (daughter-in-law of Diana Mitford, aka Lady Mosley) had access to some 12,000 personal letters exchanged by the sisters over nearly eighty years and has only chosen to use 5% of them for the book. But what a literal hoard of literary treasure!

Mrs Mosley has selected well and edited superbly, bringing out and explaining with her own notes the deep and long-lasting relationships of the sisters, the context of their times, their humour and their eccentricities, their enthusiasm for words in several languages, their loves and their tragedies and, with the exception of the delightful and redoubtable Deborah, now the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, the sadnesses of their passing.

The sisters have been described as "eccentric" and "maddening." Having read and enjoyed every one of their letters as published in this splendid work, I would be inclined to suggest that they were no more eccentric or maddening than the members of many families. But I suppose that their relatively privileged upbringing, their inclination to express themselves with confidence from an early age, their having the time to write so much - both letters and books - and the extraordinary array of celebrities with whom they mixed, all must have been major factors in how and why their lives were so "inter-esting" (or eccentric or maddening).

What were my conclusions? Well, first, I would have loved to have met any one of the ladies, though I would probably have become tongue-tied had a meeting happened. Second, my 'favourite' Mitfords are definitely Diana and Deborah, the former loyal to her late husband (Sir Oswald Mosley) to the last, and the latter clearly the most consistently loving and loved. And third, though it is often said and written that we shall never see such a correspondence again, I suggest that, even with Emails, provided they are filed, it is possible for our electronic means of communication to be preserved for future generations. I have done this with a distant relative and a pleasant (and private) little book is the result.

Finally, I wish to make it clear that I have no 'axe to grind' in praising "Mitfords": I am not and have not been related to or friendly with any of them and am merely reporting my opinion to a wider audience that this book is absolutely magnificent. Buy it now!

20th Century Blue-bloods
It's hard to imagine that there will ever be another book quite like this one; partly because of the death of letter-writing but mainly because it is hard to conceive of six astonishing characters as the Mitford sisters in one family - one sister a communist, another a duchess, yet another a bestselling novelist, yet another had Hitler as a wedding guest.

At times laugh-out-loud funny, at others incredibly moving; this is a compelling read and the range of the letters mirrors the diversity of the sisters' lives. The dramatis personae alone justifies the admission price - from Elsa Schiaparelli to Stella Tennant; Goebbels to JFK; Evelyn Waugh to Jon Snow; Winston Churchill to Lucian Freud; this book is an alternative history of the 20th Century.

If this book were a novel, it would fly of the shelves: beautiful writing, excellent jokes as well as tragedies dramatic and mundane, shaped into a compelling narrative by a very skilful editor. I can't recommend this highly enough even for those who think they already "know" the Mitford story.

A truly mixed bag
This is a difficult book to review. The editing is very well done. The layout it clear and the letters' contents are usually well annotated (though I wish this had been more continuous - should the reader be expected to remember that "Edwina" on page x is the same as that on page y, who is annotated on page z?)

The contents, though, are another matter. Despite some snippets of very interesting material, for example Unity's accounts of her meetings with Adolf Hitler, rather too many of the letters rarely rise above the mundane, superficial and vacuous. How interesting can it be, just reading that long-dead famous person dined with other long-dead famous person, page after page? Nancy's letters are a case in point. She clearly wrote far better prose than her sisters, but the level rarely rose above an obsession with her wardrobe and the weather.

This is, of course a function of the fact that these women were a product of their class and their age, and I have little interest in, or time for, any of them personally except Jessica, who actually made the effort to cut herself of from the shallowness and to work to actually make a difference. Too much of the time of the others was taken up by bemoaning their lot (only two servants, three houses etc.) or by listing their famous friends.

Only as late middle age drew upon the women did their letters (and punctuation!) improve. This is clearly an important source of material and needed to be put into the public domain, but for long stretches it is also truly disappointing.