They were impossibly glamorous, fatally flawed and turned up at every significant moment of the 20th century, but underneath it all is a highly relatable family drama – without the infamous friends
T
he rise and fall of the Mitford sisters is like one of those earthquakes we’re due on a regular rotation: eight years out from Gucci’s much-documented Never Marry a Mitford jumper, four years after the BBC drama The Pursuit of Love, a new TV show appears fortuitously to bring them back into the public consciousness again.
Here they come, out of the mists of time, the seven children of a minor member of the House of Lords: Nancy, of course, the author of Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love and probably the most famous in her own right; followed by Pamela, the least famous and fond chiefly of chickens and horrible men; then Tom, the only boy, with a weakness for the Nazis and, as far as history is concerned, no personality.
Then Diana, Mrs Oswald Mosley (Lady Mosley, please, you oik). Then Unity Valkyrie, conceived in the little Canadian town of Swastika, and led presumably by nominative determinism to Hitler’s side; and her best friend and closest sibling, Jessica (Decca), an ardent communist from childhood. Their shared room, famously, had a line down the centre: swastikas and eagles on one side, hammers and sickles the other. The baby of the family, Debo, loved horses and dogs and looking pretty, and became a duchess.
