Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson 8/10

I've just finished listening to Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson.

Before I started listening I knew little about the Mitfords, really only that they had been involved with Fascism.  The book is good and I can see now how their lives were intertwined with the monumental world events of the 1930s and 40s.  The fascists were Unity and Diana.  Diana was married to the fascist leader Oswald Mosley and they were both anti-Semites in fact Mosley was a disgusting person who after the war turned his vitriol against people joining our society from the Caribbean.  Unity had tea with Hitler as did the sisters’ mother.  Jessica was on the other side being a Communist and later a civil rights activist in America.  All three of the political sisters might be forgiven for the positions that they took before the war but don’t seem to have done enough to repudiate the Nazis and Stalin when their crimes become known.  Nancy is the engaging writer.

You can see why the girls fascinated the public with their extreme political views and their position in the high aristocracy.  Debora did become the Duchess of Devonshire in a way that seemed unremarkable to Thompson.  Thompson repeatedly says that all except Unity were beautiful so that must have been significant in generating their notoriety.  I should say that Thompson is definitely on the side of the sisters.

Overall it seems a shame that six sisters like that with their intelligence, talent for writing and the charm of their private languages should have chosen to taken a stand with fascism. I guess that they were the gifted and privileged, the archetypal bright young things, who simply did what they wanted with no sense that they should be constrained by the rules that govern the rest of us.