Jessica Mitford, the great muckraking journalist, was part of a
legendary English aristocratic family. Her sisters included Nancy,
doyenne of the 1920s London smart set and a noted novelist and
biographer; Diana, wife to the English fascist chief Sir Oswald
Mosley; Unity, who fell head over in heels in love with Hitler; and
Deborah, later the Duchess of Devonshire. Jessica swung left and
moved to America, where she took part in the civil rights movement
and wrote her classic expose of the undertaking business, "The
American Way of Death."
"Hons and Rebels" is the hugely entertaining tale of Mitford's
upbringing, which was, as she dryly remarks, "not exactly
conventional. . . Debo spent silent hours in the chicken house
learning to do an exact imitation of the look of pained
concentration that comes over a hen's face when it is laying an
egg. . . . Unity and I made up a complete language called
Boudledidge, unintelligible to any but ourselves, in which we
translated various dirty songs (for safe singing in front of the
grown-ups)." But Mitford found her family's world as smothering as
it was singular and, determined to escape it, she eloped with
Esmond Romilly, Churchill's nephew, to go fight in the Spanish
Civil War. The ensuing scandal, in which a British destroyer was
dispatched to recover the two truants, inspires some of Mitford's
funniest, and most pointed, pages.
A family portrait, a tale of youthful folly and high-spirited
adventure, a study in social history, a love story, "Hons and
Rebels" is a delightful contribution to the autobiographer's art.
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