Jessica Mitford’s Escape From Fascism

Occasionally
a small group of previously unremarkable people erupt and conquer the world:
the Macedonians, the Romans, the British, the Japanese, the Brontë sisters. The
Mitford family in the early twentieth century was another such group: Five sisters
and one son, raised in near-total isolation by reactionary parents, went on to
be, variously, the most important duchess in Britain, the first lady of British
fascism, a top-flight comic novelist, a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, and a
leading Communist and pioneer of American long-form journalism (the brother, like
Branwell Brontë, merits no consideration).   

Much
like the idea of Britain as a great power, the Mitfords are fading from popular
consciousness. The combined star wattages of Lily James, Andrew Scott, Emily
Mortimer, and Dominic West could not rescue the recent adaptation of Nancy
Mitford’s delightful The Pursuit of Love from vanishing into the depths
of Amazon Prime. Insofar as Jessica Mitford’s 1960 memoir, Hons and Rebels, is remembered at all, it is as a set of comic recollections; stories of the father, Lord Redesdale (“Farve” in the peculiar Mitford vernacular), whose
antics included supervising all medical visits, including births, and grabbing
doctors by the neck and “[shaking them] like a rat” if he did not like the
course of treatment, or “Muv” telling Jessica (known as “Decca” in
Mitfordese), “I should think a Communist would be much tidier, and not make so
much extra work for the servants.”

In
2024, the book remains uproariously funny but is clearly a tragedy. It begins
with the fact that all homes are marked by the children who live in them but that
Mitford’s was perhaps unusual because “in the windows, still to be seen, are
swastikas carved into the glass with a diamond ring, and for every swastika a
carefully delineated hammer and sickle.” It ends when Mitford is pregnant with her second
child and her beloved husband, a fellow upper-class Marxist renegade, volunteers
for the Canadian Air Force in 1940 (his death in 1941 over Hamburg is mentioned
only in a tasteful footnote).

Though
Hons and Rebels might easily be mistaken for a picaresque account of
aristocratic foibles, it is also a study of a family riven by the most extreme
ideological conflict possible; a sharp account of the English, European, and
American political scenes, approaching World War II; and an important
contribution to understanding the personal appeal of fascism to various
personality types. In America today we are accustomed to read stories of
families torn apart by Trump and Fox news; in this book written 64 years ago
Mitford brings a unique fervor and comic sensibility to exploring how one can
respond to political events and ideological splits as a member of a family and
a citizen in a democratic society. When I first read Hons and Rebels two
decades ago, I believed fascism was a defeated force, something you encountered
in books like this one; now it is alive and pulsing and stories about the
carnage it causes and the relationships it shatters are all too real, as they
were for Mitford, on a global and deadly scale.

Denied
schooling as inappropriate to girls, Mitford was educated by her mother on
stories of the glories of the “lovely pink” British Empire; the “wicked
Indians” who revolted so unkindly against the British; the horrors of the
“hateful, drab Cromwell” (which did not include his actions in Ireland) and the
“Russian Bolshies, who shot down the Czar’s dogs in cold blood.” Politics
revolved around “the Church, the Conservative Party and the House of Lords.”
During the 1926 General Strike, Mitford “smuggled my pet lamb, Miranda, into my
bedroom at night to prevent her from being shot down by the Bolshies.”