Every so often, the sisters return
In the 1930s, an aristocratic family in the U.K. became the subject of society pages because of its six sisters, who followed widely divergent paths.
The Mitford sisters were Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica ("Decca") and Deborah ("Debo"). Among them, Nancy became a bestselling novelist (Love in a Cold Climate); Diana married a British fascist leader; Unity moved to Germany and became close friends with Hitler; Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, presided over a country estate; and Jessica relocated to the U.S., joined the Communist Party and became an accomplished journalist (The American Way of Death).
Two new books examine the lives of the Mitford sisters, and both authors will be at the Desmond-Fish Public Library in Garrison on Dec. 13. Carla Kaplan is the author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, and Mimi Pond wrote and illustrated Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me.
They will be joined by Constancia "Dinky" Romilly, 84, Decca's daughter, who lives in Philipstown. Her father, Esmond Romilly - a nephew of Winston Churchill - was killed during World War II, and she was raised in Oakland, California, by her mother and stepfather, Robert Treuhaft.
"Every 20 years, there's a Mitford boom," Dinky says. "The new generation is finding out about this pretty remarkable family. My attitude about what was remarkable about my parents was completely different from Swinbrook [the Mitford home in England], and the whole growing up isolated in the country and the fascist sisters."
She points out that she was never a Mitford. "I didn't grow up in a Mitford household," she says. "My mother wasn't a recognized personality [as a writer] until after I left to go to college. I grew up in the Treuhaft household; I was Dinky Treuhaft."
Along with The American Way of Death (1963), an exposé of abuses in the funeral industry, Decca was known for Hons and Rebels (1960), a memoir of her eccentric upbringing. After moving to California, she became a political activist; her husband was a civil rights lawyer.
Dinky says that, as a child and teenager, "I knew that there was this weird family over there [in England] that had titles - the honorable this and the lord that. But when I was growing up, we lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Oakland. My parents didn't have much money. My life was going to school and taking care of my brothers after school."
Of the recurring Mitford mania, Dinky says that, "in the past, I have not liked it. It has been annoying to be constantly badgered." But she says she is pleased with the two new books.
Troublemaker follows Decca from her country girlhood to her life as an American communist and later journalist dubbed "queen of the muckrakers" by Time. Do Admit! is a graphic memoir that follows author Pond's girlhood obsession with the family's blue-blood lifestyle.
"It's exciting to see books coming out that cover all of my mother's life, starting as a Mitford, then her life as a Treuhaft, and then a Mitford again," Dinky says. "The books are both deeply researched. You know, you don't research your own mother. You just grow up with that mother, and then, after you leave home, you watch. My mother was an activist until the day she died. I learned and relearned a lot of things from both books."
Kaplan's book focuses on Jessica Mitford "as a person who very consciously changed from an aristocrat, a person of privilege, to a worker in the movements of her time, to a radical activist," says Dinky. It documents "the change in this woman and how she negotiated it, and how that fit in with the history of the period."
Pond's book is about the six sisters, "how they developed, how they grew, what their relationships were among each other," Dinky says. "Another good reason to read Mimi's book is that it's clear that my mother was her favorite!"
A third book will be available at the event: a newly released paperback edition of Decca's edited letters, of w...
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