The High-Born Rebel Who Took Up the Cause of the Commoner

"Growing up, I never had a sister, but I always wanted one-or many. Reading alone in my room, I imagined myself into tight-knit literary sororities: the Bennets, the Marches, the Dashwoods. These packs had their problems-petty squabbles, broken confidences, burnt hair-but I envied their intimacy and loyalty. It was the gang first, the world second. Beyond the precincts of fiction, of course, the world has a way of meddling with such bonds."

"The Mitford sisters, born between 1904 and 1920, grew up in a cloistered environment that, had it not existed, would seem the stuff of fairy tales. Their father, David Freeman-Mitford, or Lord Redesdale, was a Conservative British peer who was an intermittently successful Army man before settling into his inherited land in the Cotswolds. His wife, Sydney Bowles, or Lady Redesdale, was the pampered daughter of the media baron Thomas Gibson Bowles, who, among other ventures, founded Vanity Fair."

The Mitford family produced six daughters born between 1904 and 1920 who pursued strikingly divergent lives. Two sisters embraced fascism, one joined the Communist movement, one embodied traditional aristocratic roles, one authored novels that skewered the bourgeoisie, and one sought cultivated solitude. The sisters grew up in a cloistered Cotswolds environment shaped by their father, David Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, a Conservative peer and former Army officer, and their mother, Sydney Bowles, daughter of media baron Thomas Gibson Bowles, founder of Vanity Fair. The family's aristocratic class identity included a pronounced distrust of outsiders and was affected by fluctuating finances. The sisters' contrasts attracted sustained public fascination.

Read at The New Yorker