This book helped start me down the road of Mitford obsession. ( )

24 Jan 2009 - birthday present from Jen

I'd been after this one for ages and it took me a while to read, as letters are an easy thing to pick up and put down and I had other reading goals to complete in the meantime. Anyway, I took some big gulps of this over the weekend and got it finished. A lovely book and you get a real sense of the women as *sisters* - the biogs and even the other letters I've read tend to treat them separately, putting them together only when they clashed. But here we have the real, everyday work of keeping in touch, worrying to eath other about a particular sister and, as the book moves on, inevitably sharing their grief at the losses of friends and then, with horrible inevitability, each sister as she dies.

Beautifully edited and introduced by Charlotte Moseley, who as usual includes just enough to help us out but not so much information that we're flooded. An introductory piece at the beginning of each section helps put things in context and help us understand what we're reading.

Marvellous letters, great photos and facsimiles throughout, and truly a book to treasure. ( )

A fascinating compilation of the letters between the Mitford sisters. Remarkably, the book only contains 5% of all the letters in the prolific correspondence. Even if you have no prior knowledge of the Mitfords (like me) you will find this book utterly engrossing as several of the sisters were writers -and good ones too! It is well footnoted with many explanatory inserts (though it takes a lot of flipping back and forth in the beginning in order to get used to some of the nicknames). It is funny, shocking, heartbreaking, and always a bit glamorous. Highly recommended. ( )

At just over 800 pages this collection of letters, covering the period 1925 to 2003, is a long but very interesting read.

The Mitford sisters were born between 1904 and 1920. They are Nancy (writer), Pamela (rural, farming type), Diana (fascist), Unity (Hitler-adoring fascist), Jessica (communist) and Deborah (Duchess of Devonshire). Crude descriptions of each but these are the ones that Charlotte Mosley uses to help the reader quickly recognise who is writing to whom.

The letters provide a fascinating insight into family relationships and reinforce the adage that you can't choose your family. Up to about 1960 there is little emotional detail in the letters, even when children die and divorces happen. Of course there are major political disagreements between the sisters but it is only as Nancy and Jessica being to publish their memoirs that more emotional thoughts come to the forefront. I think this is the most interesting aspect of the book for me. Nancy and Jessica both write about their horrible childhood experiences and are scathing about their parents. This does not accord with the remembrances of Diana, Deborah and Pamela (Unity died in 1948). They feel that N and J have been deeply disloyal, a feeling that lasts well into old age for all of them and is reinforced by various Mitford biographies that repeat these semtiments over the years. However, in 2000 Diana revisits some of Pamela's letters from 1925 and is surprised by "how unfairly strict Muv seems to have been". Memories of childhood are so subjective.

I also enjoyed seeing how the relationships between the sisters changed over time and distance. For example, once Nancy has died Deborah and Diana become much more critical about her and often discuss her dishonesty and other dislikeable character traits that were merely hinted at when she's alive.

The sisters' relationships with men are also interesting. Diana and Nancy fall deeply for men with very strong and really quite unpleasant characters, but they stay true to them and defend them to the last. Many of Diana's letters talk about her efforts to deflect criticism of her husband, Oswald Mosley.

The breadth of experiences the sisters have is astounding. Diana spent time in Holloway prison during the war because of her husband's political activitites. Jessica elopes with a communist. Deborah turns into a skilled business women and transforms Chatsworth House into one of the UK's most visited tourist attractions. Nancy receives the Legion d'Honneur. They all eventually publish books. And they knew so many people, from Evelyn Waugh to JFK to Nicki Lauder.

I suppose one can't review this book without mentioning fascism. Unity was absolutely obsessed with Hitler and engineered a meeting with him in 1935 that led to a friendship that lasted until 1939 when Unity tried to kill herself after the declaration of war. It's so hard to understand her. In 1935 she wrote "the Fuhrer was heavenly...he talked a lot about Jews, which was lovely". I found this absolutely chilling. I'm surprised that only Jessica condemned Unity's behaviour outright. I suppose that, as with Diana's relationship with Oswald Mosley, Unity found Hitler to be very charasmatic and she agreed with much of his politics. I guess she wasn't the only one. ( )

Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters took me a while to finish but I'm so glad I've read it. I'll need some time to emerge from it, it's a 800-page book (only 5% of their whole correspondence, can you believe it?) and I'm so happy I've read it. Some of it was really disturbing (Deborah's and Diana's correspondence in particular - Deborah's not as good a person as I thought she was) and even bizarre. For example, Jessica mentions how wonderful Natasha Richardson is in a letter written in 1986. Felt completely strange reading that recently - I mean, what a coincidence. At the end, Deborah gives her opinion to Diana about Diana Spencer's death and it felt so close to today it was disturbing as well, especially since her opinion is quite infuriating. I know that Deborah is still alive but one can't help but picturing the Mitfords as firmly rooted in the craziness of the 30s. Yet the letters begin way before the Second World war and end in 2003. It's a great historical document, funny, shocking and heartbreaking.
However, I would strongly recommend reading Jessica's letters first because Charlotte Mosley, who edited this book, had to leave so many of Decca's letters out to avoid redundance so Jessica appears as fairly distant and cold when she's just the opposite when one reads her letters (Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford).