Occasionally a small group of previously unremarkable people erupt and conquer the world: the Macedonians, the Romans, the British, the Japanese, the Brontë sisters. The Mitford family in the early twentieth century was another such group: Five sisters and one son, raised in near-total isolation by reactionary parents, went on to be, variously, the most important duchess in Britain, the first lady of British fascism, a top-flight comic novelist, a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, and a leading Communist and pioneer of American long-form journalism (the brother, like Branwell Brontë, merits no consideration).
Much like the idea of Britain as a great power, the Mitfords are fading from popular consciousness. The combined star wattages of Lily James, Andrew Scott, Emily Mortimer, and Dominic West could not rescue the recent adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s delightful The Pursuit of Love from vanishing into the depths of Amazon Prime. Insofar as Jessica Mitford’s 1960 memoir, Hons and Rebels, is remembered at all, it is as a set of comic recollections; stories of the father, Lord Redesdale (“Farve” in the peculiar Mitford vernacular), whose antics included supervising all medical visits, including births, and grabbing doctors by the neck and “[shaking them] like a rat” if he did not like the course of treatment, or “Muv” telling Jessica (known as “Decca” in Mitfordese), “I should think a Communist would be much tidier, and not make so much extra work for the servants.”
In 2024, the book remains uproariously funny but is clearly a tragedy. It begins with the fact that all homes are marked by the children who live in them but that Mitford’s was perhaps unusual because “in the windows, still to be seen, are swastikas carved into the glass with a diamond ring, and for every swastika a carefully delineated hammer and sickle.” It ends when Mitford is pregnant with her second child and her beloved husband, a fellow upper-class Marxist renegade, volunteers for the Canadian Air Force in 1940 (his death in 1941 over Hamburg is mentioned only in a tasteful footnote).
Though Hons and Rebels might easily be mistaken for a picaresque account of aristocratic foibles, it is also a study of a family riven by the most extreme ideological conflict possible; a sharp account of the English, European, and American political scenes, approaching World War II; and an important contribution to understanding the personal appeal of fascism to various personality types. In America today we are accustomed to read stories of families torn apart by Trump and Fox news; in this book written 84 years ago Mitford brings a unique fervor and comic sensibility to exploring how one can respond to political events and ideological splits as a member of a family and a citizen in a democratic society. When I first read Hons and Rebels two decades ago, I believed fascism was a defeated force, something you encountered in books like this one; now it is alive and pulsing and stories about the carnage it causes and the relationships it shatters are all too real, as they were for Mitford, on a global and deadly scale.
Denied schooling as inappropriate to girls, Mitford was educated by her mother on stories of the glories of the “lovely pink” British Empire; the “wicked Indians” who revolted so unkindly against the British; the horrors of the “hateful, drab Cromwell” (which did not include his actions in Ireland) and the “Russian Bolshies, who shot down the Czar’s dogs in cold blood.” Politics revolved around “the Church, the Conservative Party and the House of Lords.” During the 1926 General Strike, Mitford “smuggled my pet lamb, Miranda, into my bedroom at night to prevent her from being shot down by the Bolshies.”
All the girls dreamed of escape from the hellacious boredom of Swinbrook House. Debo, the future Duchess, “spent silent hours in the chicken house learning to do exact imitations of the look of pained concentration that comes over a hen’s face when it is laying an egg.” The future novelist, Nancy, obsessed about the class inflections of language, while Diana, the future wife of Oswald Mosley, obsessed over the possibilities of fast and glamorous living. Unity, the future friend of Hitler, and Decca, the future Communist, “made up a complete language called Boudledidge,” into which they translated pornographic verses so as to be able to recite them in any company.
The question that later consumed Mitford—how could most of the family she loved either support or be sympathetic to Hitler?—has an obvious answer: These were “nature’s fascists,” downwardly mobile aristocrats living in great ignorance and fear. Muv was fanatically opposed to vaccines, and the family ate no pork because “Jews never get cancer.” Farve ranted about hating “Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners … children, the majority of my older sisters’ acquaintances [and] almost all young men,” while believing the category of “blacks” included the Spanish. Their son was killed in the Pacific Theatre because he refused to fight the Germans. Diana was always “casting about for something more exciting, more intriguing than the London season … something amazing, shocking,” and after adultery and divorce she found that in brown shirts. The much more interesting question is why Decca ended up married to a Jewish New Dealer and living in Oakland, California, in possession of a CPUSA membership card.
Many daughters of boring peers were raised in rural idiocy, but Jessica Mitford was the only one who in childhood established a “Running Away Account” at Drummonds Bank in London. What is clear from her memoir is that the social structures of a leftist movement channeled the unease she felt when she started to “catch disturbing, vivid glimpses of the real meaning of poverty, hunger, cold, cruelty.” Because there was a socialist press, she was able to “become an avid reader” and discovered in Marxism the solution to her puzzlement at the scale of human suffering. As she steeped in Marx, she found “enormous new vistas of thought and action that opened up on every side.” Without that she might have followed the equally restless Unity into fascism.
With half the family ballroom dedicated to her statue of Lenin and collection of Communist literature, and half to Unity’s collection of fascist paraphernalia, the sisters staged mock battles and “talked of what would happen in a revolutionary situation. We both agreed we’d simply have to be prepared to fight on opposite sides, and even tried to picture what it would be like if one day one of us had to give the order for the other’s execution.” I have not thankfully had to imagine executing any of my family, but I have severed relationships with friends of decades’ standing who found it to their advantage to side with ascendant Trumpism. I feel calmer about severing those relationships after reading Mitford’s absolute conviction she could kill her own beloved sister to defeat fascism.
How to use the Running Away money, though? Mitford quickly realized she had no practical skills to survive in the real world (many of the funniest passages are about her learning to do things like cook and wash her underwear after she did finally run away) and decided to give it further thought. In the meantime, she fell in love through the press with her second cousin, Winston Churchill’s “Red nephew,” Esmond Romilly. Romilly had run away from boarding school and started a leftist periodical titled Out of Bounds to share tales of the brutality of the schools and expose the way they were training boys to be the violent masters of empire and fascist collaborators. Meanwhile Mitford’s family became more and more outright Nazi, and finding herself “hopelessly outnumbered,” she often retreated to her room for a “lonely cry.”
Deliverance came in the form of the Spanish Civil War, which of course split her family further. They were “preoccupied with politics” and followed the newspaper and the BBC religiously. Screaming frequently broke out. Mitford “despised herself” for living in the lap of luxury with the very people supporting Franco. Finally a use for the Running Away account came into view: “My thoughts centered obsessively on getting [to Spain].”
In 1937, when she was 19, she was at a country house weekend party with Romilly, who was back from Spain after being wounded fighting on the front. She immediately asked him to take her there, and he, having heard tales of her radical politics, readily agreed. The 50 pounds in the Running Away Account sealed the deal. Soon they concocted a cover story about a trip to visit the Paget twins in Dieppe and departed for France to get her a Spanish visa. A series of comic misadventures followed as they evaded detection and ping-ponged around Europe, while Mitford learned how to cook an egg. Before too long they had become lovers who intended to marry, and made their way to Bilbao as journalists.
Neither Mitford’s family nor the British government took this lying down (and Hitler consoled Unity: “poor child”). Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden cabled the resident in Bilbao: “Find Jessica Mitford and persuade her to return.” When this failed, a British naval ship was sent to kidnap her, which she evaded by the simple expedient of refusing the captain’s repeated offers to dine on board. Finally the British government threatened to stop receiving all Basque refugees unless the couple departed Spain, so they returned to France, where they were married. This was a great relief to her childhood nanny, who had been desperately worried she “didn’t have any suitable clothes to fight in.”
But having seen fascist depredations in Spain, Mitford was more radical than ever. After failing to make their fortune on the French Riviera as gamblers, she and Romilly moved to the working-class London area of Rotherhithe, where the pale workmen appeared to her as members of a different species from those she had grown up with. Finding the Communist Party riven with factionalism, they threw themselves into the local radical Labour Party branch and Spanish War support (here the memoirs gets a bit fuzzy as Romilly was clearly disenchanted with communism while Mitford was a Communist when she wrote the memoir). Having lost a baby because the local clinic assumed she, like everyone else in the working-class area, had had childhood measles and thereby her newborn would have immunity, and being chased by debt collectors, the couple decided to move to the United States, overcoming their lack of funds by mesmerizing the American consul in London with the “magic words”:
Sir, my wife and I hold dear a most heartfelt deep and sincere faith in the ability of your gre-a-a-t country, the Land of Opportunity … to provide, through its Free Enterprise system, a modest but adequate living for those young people who, like ourselves, are imbued with the spirit of Rugged Individualism.
The consul, “with a faraway look in his eyes” declared, “Well, I guess I’ll take a chance on you kids.” They sailed February 18, 1939, for New York armed with letters of introduction to the social elite and the political radicals.
The American section is one of the most rewarding parts of the book. Some of it will strike a familiar chord, like Mitford and Romilly’s shock at the greatly elevated level of creature comforts in the United States versus Europe and their continual surprise at how outgoing and friendly Americans are. Other passages take us into the past as a foreign country: Mitford’s view of Martha’s Vineyard as the bohemian retreat of the socialist left and Washington, D.C., as an idealistic seat of government (“much of what was best in America was concentrated here in the capital, and was represented by this bright, sincere group of liberals”). She and Romilly made friends with any number of intellectuals and several rich patrons of intellectuals. They won over the Meyer family, owners of The Washington Post, who hosted them, commissioned articles, and loaned them $1,000 to buy into an Italian restaurant in Miami after they accidentally took a wrong turn on the way to New Orleans. They also became friends with the owner of The New Republic, Michael Straight, who took time out from both his day job and his night job of spying for the Soviet Union to provide Romilly and Mitford with references as a valet and lady’s maid, in case they ever became “really stranded.”
A particularly rich section of the book describes the couple’s stint working as door-to-door silk stocking salespeople. It is interesting not only in its own right but also as a clear forerunner of Mitford’s 1963 book The American Way of Death and for its attention to how the sales mechanism of capitalism works in practice (by exploitation and fast-talking). The future course of her radicalism in America can be seen in her horror at encountering racial segregation and her incomprehension that American Federation of Labor leaders “were indistinguishable from . . . midwestern businessmen.” When she invited a group of labor leaders to sing the socialist anthem “The Red Flag,” then a standard feature of European union gatherings, they stared at her in incomprehension. When she asked what stance the union took on foreign policy, she was “met with blank, uncomprehending stares.” They were, to her horror, capitalists. The path to that CPUSA card and her refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee is visible. That she would leave the party to become an independent Marxist is an inevitability given the rebellious character revealed on every page.
Initially believing that Britain’s true hope was a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union, the couple feared that Britain would either switch sides or not fully prosecute the war and so stayed in the neutral United States. Once the war began in earnest and Uncle Winston, the despised imperialist, became prime minister, they knew that, whatever else, Britain would now fully commit to fighting Nazism. Romilly left to fight and, as it turned out, to die. Hons and Rebels ends here, though of course Mitford lived another 56 years, and recounted her Communist years in the subsequent memoir, A Fine Old Conflict.
There are endless memoirs of this period, by aristocrats, by Communists, even by other aristocratic Communists. Esmond Romilly wrote one himself. Unlike so many other memoirs of rebellion and resistance, what makes Hons and Rebels stand out and endure is not only Mitford’s unique comic voice but her inquisitiveness and humanity. Not many people have had a sister who attempted suicide by gunshot because their home country went to war with Adolf Hitler; no one else could write about it with the same combination of pain and clarity of condemnation. All this loss and death and shattered relationships could have left Mitford a shell; instead her madcap search for how to live the “good life” in every sense gave her an incredible fate and gave us an incredible memoir.
