Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105582 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Synopsis
A portrait of the Mitford sisters follows Jessica, a communist; Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy, a best-selling novelist; Diana, who was the most hated woman in England; and Unity, who was obsessed with Adolf Hitler.

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful Introduction
I don't like biographies; but I absolutely adored this book, it covers a huge subject - the lives of 6 remarkable women spanning much of the 20th Century. Mary Lovell has researched their lives and manages to convey the story wonderfully. Obviously because of the constraints of how large a book can actually be there maybe more detailed, individual biographies out there but I think this is a great place to start - it certainly has set me on the path to finding out as much as I can about these women who lived such glorious lives right at the forefront of history.

To give you a little taster there is:
Nancy - the famous author, in love with an aloof Frenchman.
Diana - the glamorous beauty who left her husband for the head of the British Nazi party (Oswald Moseley) and spent much of the second world war sleeping under a fur coat in a dank prison cell.
Decca - who ran off to fight on the communist side in the Spanish Civil & later became a prominent member of the Black civil rights movement in America.
Unity who fell in love with Hitler and tried to kill herself on the day war was declared between Britain and Germany. Hitler himself organised her return to Britain.
Debo - who declared when she was 6 that she wanted to be a Duchess and is the current dowager Duchess of Devonshire.
Pam - the farmer, my only complaint about this otherwise wonderful book is that Pam really gets very little coverage.

In addition to the sisters there are their parents who are deliciously eccentric characters of the sort that sadly no longer exists, their father in particular (seen as Uncle Mathew in "The Pursuit of love" and "Love in a cold climate") is hilarious - family legend has it that as a young man he read the novel "white fang" and was so impressed by it that he refused to ever read another novel as he felt he had read the best why bother with the rest.

I bought this book for myself and have subsequently given it to parents and friends and all of them loved it, and have gifted it to others in their turn. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Auntie Lovell diapproves
If you've read "Hons and Rebels" first and then, curious about what happened next, pick up this tome, you're in for a nasty fall. Obviously, not everyone can be a Decca in wit and style but Lovell's book is, to quote Decca once more, "'Woman's Own' writing". On the upside, it's meticulously researched and draws on a wealth of previously inaccessible material, most of all private letters. So if you're simply interested in the facts about the entire family, this is, unfortunately, the only place to go. But the bland style and moralistic tut-tutting about Decca (hardly ever about Diana, the unrepentent Nazi) is annoying to say the least. I couldn't agree more with the other reviewers who pointed out that Lovell is clearly biased towards Diana and against Decca. The whole book is, inadvertently, an example of what Decca in "Hons and Rebel" calls "disapproving auntism". Lovell is a disapproving auntie and that shines through on every page.
Four stars for the research job but one, at most, for the judgmental author who doesn't begin to be a match to her fascinating subjects.

A stinker
Like reading the Daily Mail Sunday Magazine the very opposite of Mitford esque (light sharp and witty)writing.