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

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So instead of centering their drawing room conversations on historical irrelevancies, as they might have assumed would be their duty as minor society figures of no particular wealth or status, they were centering those conversations on the figures who would shape European and American politics throughout the wars and beyond. They were in the middle of a deadly serious conflict that would kill millions, including their own loved ones, and, ultimately, tear the family into pieces. Yet even in the midst of the reality of the war, the sisters’ letters and Jessica’s memoirs and Nancy’s novels continue to sparkle, to shine, to charm.

Hons and Rebels - Jessica Mitford - Google Books

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.' The audiobook I listened to is narrated by Jenny Agutter. It is based on the book’s 1989 edition which restores that which had been removed from the original 1960 edition. The narration is excellent. I adored the different inflections used for Americans and Brits.So Jessica tells us the tale of someone born into privilege, luxury, and uselessness, who finds all of these qualities completely intolerable and who cannot, cannot, cannot endure the idea of the life that is laid out before her. She doesn't know what she believes, but she's sure it's not what her family believes.

Hons and Rebels | The Society of Hons Jessica Mitford | Hons and Rebels | The Society of Hons

By the time of her first London season in 1935, Decca was smouldering: she hated the world into which she had been born and now longed to leave. A committed socialist, her mind was firmly focused on running away, and an irresistible opportunity presented itself the following year with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The war profoundly divided the Mitfords, Unity and Diana passionately proFranco, while Decca immediately became a committed Loyalist, determined somehow to leave England and join the fight in Spain. ‘Fortress aspects of life at home now came to the forefront with a vengeance,’ she recalled. ‘I was in headlong opposition to everything the family stood for.’ But the new Pursuit of Love does provide us with an opportunity to consider what remains valuable about The Pursuit of Love — and, by extension, what is valuable about the history of the Mitfords altogether. That’s the sensibility that breathes through their best work: a sense of joy and play that continues through brutal, bloody moments of history. Wigs on the Green is still a satire of Nancy’s social set, but since that social set had come to include avowed Nazis and avowed communists, so does the novel: It skewers Diana’s courtship with the fascist Mosley, and Unity’s budding fascism. (Diana eventually forgave Nancy for the book, but Unity never did.) By the time she released Pigeon Pie in 1940, Nancy was writing light social satire about the war. The heroine of Pigeon Pie is an English aristocrat who transforms herself into a Beautiful Female Spy to fight the fascists.

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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. When we talk about the Mitfords, we are principally interested in the six sisters who came of age on their parents’ country estate between the two world wars: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. (There was a brother, too, Thomas, but we need not concern ourselves with him. He was the Robert Kardashian of the family.) 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 – New York Review Books

The memoir is chopped short at this point, when her husband leaves for Canada to enlist, having ensconced his pregnant wife in the home of some wealthy Americans (on whom she also looks down) who don't quite realise she is being foisted on them for the duration. One wonders how long the marriage would have lasted if he had returned from the front.

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Los acontecimientos que hacen historia suelen parecer interminables cuando uno los está viviendo. Solo al cabo de los años se tiene la perspectiva suficiente para ver lo esencial, reducido ya a expresiones telescópicas y simplistas para los libros de historia […] En la vida real, el desarrollo de una crisis que conduce a un cambio de gobierno, el curso de negociaciones y conferencias internacionales que conforman el destino de una generación o el flujo y reflujo de las batallas que deciden el resultado de una guerra se desarrollan con exasperante parsimonia, como a cámara lenta, y el significado decisivo de cada etapa a menudo termi na enterrado bajo ríos de tinta y montañas de especulaciones, rumores, interpretaciones, relatos «inspirados», comentarios a favor y en contra.” Si hay algo que me ha resultado conmovedor es su manera de pasar de puntillas sobre los momentos más dolorosos para ella. Y es en esa falta de detalles y de explica 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. The tensions of the 1930s are here played out within one family, with Jessica running off to be a reporter’s assistant in the Spanish Civil War with her second cousin (a nephew of Churchill’s) while Unity was busy being pals with Hitler in Germany (Nancy had been part of the 1920s Bright Young People crowd, friends with Evelyn Waugh and others, but in the ’30s seemed to spend her time trying to calm down the excesses of her more political sisters). It makes for fascinating reading, to see such a unique and witty family caught up in these political conflicts in their own way, dividing the sitting room Unity and Jessica shared down the middle, with fascist propaganda on one side and communist on the other.

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

Many people know about the Mitfords, but if you don’t, here’s the brief run-down: Nancy the novelist wrote The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate (both highly recommended), along with other novels; Diana married the leader of the British Union of Fascists; Unity was fascinated by Hitler and shot herself at the start of WW2; Jessica (‘Decca’) was the communist who lived in America most of her life; Deborah (‘Debo’) became the Duchess of Devonshire. The remaining siblings Pam and Tom didn’t acquire quite so much press. While all her elders were trooping off to Munich, Decca was languishing at home, but not for long. She heard that her cousin, Esmond Romilly, had run away from school to fight with the Communists in the Spanish Civil War and the next year, 1937, she eloped with him. She was 19, he 18, and the fact that he was Churchill's nephew made for gratifying headlines.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. Leni Riefenstahl claims that Hitler told her he could never have an intimate relationship with a foreigner. But he was obviously very fond of Unity; he called her 'Kind' (child) and took her to Bayreuth. Moreover, he was happy to meet the various members of her family who came on visits; they were all duly charmed, except Farve, who persisted in referring to Nazis as 'a murderous gang of pests'. Diana, of course, had her own reasons for cultivating Hitler - he was guest of honour at her wedding to Oswald Mosley in 1936 - but these will have to wait for a posthumous historian.