The (almost) golden girls.

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Author: Slung, Michelle

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A new book about the famously gifted Mitford sisters suggests that beauty, charm, money, talent and titles are not all they're cracked up to be.

THE SEEMINGLY ENCHANTED WORLD OF the Mitford family, whose six beautiful and charismatic daughtersâ€"Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborahâ€"took England by storm in the era between the two World Wars, is one that has captivated onlookers for nearly a century. At once the heroines and villainesses of the British tabloid press, the Mitford girls, the daughters of the 2nd Baron Redesdale, were born into a landed aristocracy that took for granted both its hardships and its luxuries. Their lives were filled with equal parts muddy gum boots and unheated rooms, silver spoons and hand-me-down tiaras. And they resembled nothing so much as a boisterous amalgam of the Muses, the Graces, the Fates and the Sirensâ€"as likely to be found in the pages of Bulfinch's Mythology as Debrett's Peerage.

In The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (Norton), Mary S. Lovell explains that her own fascination with the Mitfords began after reading Nancy's satirical novels (the best known of which are The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate), “for which she drew largely upon her family for characters” and Jessica's memoir, Hons and Rebels.

It was with the appearance of these books that not just Mary Lovell but several generations of fans around the globe became fully Mitford-struck. Weâ€"for I count myself among their numberâ€"were all hopelessly seduced by the droll antics and whimsical adventures of a household of seven children (a brother, Tom, died in his thirties of war wounds), growing up with their titled parents at Asthall, a Jacobean manor house in Oxfordshire, surrounded by the rolling green Cotswolds. Attended by governesses, game-keepers and gardeners, the raucous Mitford brood formed secret societies, dreamed up elaborate pranks, took part in amateur theatricals and invented obscure nicknames for one another, as a way of highlighting their special separateness.

Books, it must be mentioned, did play a role in this singularly physically active upbringing, and in fact, the library at Asthall, a converted barn connected to the main house by a covered passage known as “the cloisters,” was one of the features of the property the children most adored. “Furnished with comfortable armchairs and a grand piano, it was a desirable place to the children for they were hardly ever bothered by grown-ups there, and provided they behaved reasonably, replaced any books where they found them, and did not make too much mess, they were left alone.”

In The Pursuit of Love, Nancy reports, “The Radlett [read Mitford] children read enormously by fits and starts in the library at Alconleigh [read Asthall], a good…library, which had been made by their grandfather, a most cultivated man. But, while they picked up a great deal of heterogeneous information, and gilded it with their own originality, while they bridged gulfs of ignorance with their charm and high spirits, they never acquired any habit of concentration.”

But despite their deficits of both education and attention, four of the six girls went on to become authors. Nancy, the eldest, had determined early on that she would be a writer, and she was the first of her siblings to succeed in the literary world, with her deliciously witty fictional confections of upper-upper-class English life. Later, she became a student of French culture and went on to publish such acclaimed biographies as Voltaire in Love and Madame de Pompadour. (One friend wittily described the experience of reading this last as seeming as if “an enchantingly clever woman were telling the story over the telephone.”)

Despite Deborah's claims that none of her five sisters managed ever to be truly ordinary, Pam, the second oldest, succeeded at the task rather better than the rest. She adored domesticity and country life and was known throughout her life as “the quiet sister.”

Next in line came the ravishingly blonde Diana. She had been one of the most celebrated debutantes ever to be presented at court, and by nineteen was married to Bryan Guinness, young scion of one of the country's greatest fortunes. At twenty-two, she had been painted by London's most fashionable portrait artists and soon was to risk everything by falling head over heels in love with the “dashing and dangerous Sir Oswald Mosley,” head of the British Union of Fascists. Diana's deep and abiding passion for her notorious second husband lasted until his death, forty-four years later, and included prison terms for both of them, due to their defiantly proAxis wartime activities. Diana's autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, published in the late 1970's, was pronounced “unrepentant” by the popular press.

Unity Mitford was the fourth and most unfortunate daughter. Her hero worship of Adolf Hitler, to whose entourage she attached herself during the war, made her a continually reviled figure on the English home front. When she died, at age thirty-four, she had been an invalid for nearly a decade, following a suicide attempt. Still she was able to reassure her mother, Lady Redesdale, that her memories of her childhood at Asthall were unspoiled. “No one ever had such a happy young life as I did up to the war,” was her poignant assertion.

Jessica, known as Decca, was daughter number five. Her radical sympathies-both of her husbands were Communists-meant that she was often at loggerheads with the rest of her family. By 1960, when she published Hons and Rebels (the title refers to a secret society the Mitford children organized), a volume that fed off her family's notoriety, she had been disowned by her father. Expatriated to California, she went on to write such different books as the exposés The American Way of Death and The American Way of Birth.

Finally, there was Deborah (known as Debo), the youngest Mitford sister. In her sixties, she turned herself into a best-selling author after she published The House (1982), a highly readable history of her husband's ancestral home. As wife of the nth Duke of Devonshire, she has reigned over that great national treasure, Chatsworth, since 1950. The young couple managed to save the estate from being broken up to pay the taxes after his father's early death. Now in her eighties, she has just released a book of delightful essays, Counting My Chickens and Other Home Thoughts (Farrar Straus & Giroux).

For those Anglophile readers whose idea of perfect bliss is to reread The Pursuit of Love (or its sequels, Love in a Cold Climate, Don't Tell Alfred and The Blessing) for the hundredth time, Lovell's volume is a must-have. The panorama she has assembled has much to offer both new and old Mitford fans. Though it begins with the clan's youthful capers and moves gaily on through the spectacle of hunt balls in ancient castles and society weddings that dominated the picture pages of the London tabloids, it is often overlaid with mourning crepe. “When I began researching,” the author writes, “I had in mind a frothy biography of life in Society between the wars. I knew of the polarized ideologies of Diana, Unity and Decca, but I had not realized how quickly or how completely the mirth of the sisters' childhood disintegrated into conflict, unexpected private passions, and tragedies.”

In Counting My Chickens, the Duchess of Devonshire, with perfect tact, has this to say: “My sisters were all very strong characters and totally different from one another, yet, like all families, we still had a strong link, which survived grown-up differences of politics.” Concludes this youngest of the Mitford girls, “I look back on my childhood as a very happy time. It is unfashionable to do so, I know….I was conventionally and boringly happy, I suppose, and thought our upbringing was like everyone else's. But, on looking back, I don't think it was.”

To order books, call (800) 467-9195.

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By Michelle Slung

Illustration by David Pohl