It occurs to me that some people might not know who the Mitford sisters were. Do you know who the Mitford sisters were? They were the daughters of a minor peer, raised partly in London and partly in Oxfordshire, and were notable for their eccentricities, which is what you call it when rich white people do things that would be unacceptable if they were poor or black. Nancy, the eldest, had a string of husbands and lovers before settling down in Paris with a man she refused to marry but lived very happily with (scandalous at the time). Jessica eloped with an aristocratic communist, and then, much worse, with an American communist. Unity and Diana both got into fascism in a big way; Unity shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany (she survived, but later died essentially due to complications arising from the bullet that was STILL IN HER HEAD). Diana’s second wedding took place in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room. Deborah towed the line a bit more by marrying well, and ended up managing Chatsworth house in her capacity as Duchess of Devonshire. Pamela was mostly into animals, bless her, though that goes for all of them: during Unity’s debutante season, she frequently showed up at balls and parties draped in her pet grass-snake, Enid.
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