Mitford Sisters

 A propos de la correspondance des soeurs Mitford.

 

The Mitford sisters — Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah, born between 1904 and 1920.

Unity, whose mental health seems to have been frail, developed a bizarre crush on Adolf Hitler and managed by assiduous stalking to worm her way into the Führer's inner circle. When England and Germany went to war, Unity was unable to reconcile her conflicting loyalties, and she shot herself in the head. But the bullet succeeded only in crippling her, and she lived until 1948 in a state of childlike imbecility.

More intelligent and capable, was Diana, the beauty of the family, who already as a teenager moved in the highest literary and artistic circles. Evelyn Waugh dedicated "Vile Bodies" to Diana and her first husband, Bryan Guinness, and used them as models for his brittle, glamorous Bright Young Things. In 1932, however, Diana fell in love with Sir Oswald Mosley, the sinister leader of the British Union of Fascists, and began to live openly as his mistress. The couple was married a few years later, at the home of Joseph and Magda Goebbels, with Hitler in attendance.

Jessica, the next-to-youngest sister, rebelled against her aristocratic upbringing in another fashion, eloping at age 17 with the glamorous young communist Esmond Romilly. The couple went to America, and after the outbreak of war, when Romilly enlisted in the Royal Air Force and was killed, Jessica decided to stay. She married a fellow communist, a lawyer named Robert Treuhaft, and moved to Oakland, Calif., where she combined pioneering civil-rights activism with loud adulation of the Soviet Union.

The oldest sister, Nancy, and the youngest, Deborah, steered clear of politics, but they too found ways of staying in the public eye. Nancy achieved literary fame in 1945 with her novel "The Pursuit of Love," based in large part on the Mitfords' own childhood. After the war she moved to France, where she conducted a decades-long affair with Gaston Palewski, a high-ranking member of the de Gaulle government. Deborah took the most respectable path of all, marrying the heir to a dukedom and eventually becoming the duchess of Devonshire. Pamela, who devoted herself to farming and animal breeding, seems to be the only Mitford sister whose head was not turned by the family's notoriety.

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Unity's letter to Jessica in 1937, explaining why her Nazism shouldn't stop her from being friends with Jessica's Communist husband: "My attitude to Esmond is as follows — and I rather expect his to be the same. I naturally wouldn't hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary for my cause, and I should expect him to do the same to me. But in the meanwhile, as that isn't necessary, I don't see why we shouldn't be quite good friends, do you."

Adam Kirsch - The New York Sun - 31 octobre 2007.

Ps : Voeux : si je gagne au loto, je fais traduire et édite la correspondance entre Evelyn Waugh et Nancy Mitford