Power Lovers the House of Mitford

By Melvin Maddocks

They were prototypes for Evelyn Waugh's "Bright Young People," the six sisters and a brother who provided a perfect historical metaphor for the fashionable confusions of their class and time. With apt symbolism, the Mitford girls paraded at smart London parties dressed as decadent Roman empresses. When the horses and hounds on their country estate bored them, the Mitfords traipsed abroad, treating Europe as their private playground. As the advancing shadow of World War II put a stop to the fun, they turned their patrician self-assurance to extremist politics. Nancy wrote the inside story in autobiographical novels, while Diana and Jessica wrote novelistic autobiographies. Now Diana's son Jonathan Guinness and his daughter Catherine have added their account.

"Power worship," many critics suggest, was the particular Mitford sin, and the Guinnesses partially agree. Diana, the beauty of the family, with passionate eyes set in a curiously passive face, showed "a potential for extremism." Translation: she fell in love with British Fascist Leader Sir Oswald Mosley and the ideas he believed in.

Unity, the fourth sister, went further than Diana to justify the remark of an old family friend: "You Mitfords like dictators." She held hands with Hitler, whom she described as "sweet" as well as "the greatest man of all time." Diana spent nearly 3 1/2 years in prison during World War II for her romance with fascism. Unity shot and grievously wounded herself when her beloved England went to war with her beloved Germany.

The Guinnesses are really too kind to mother and aunties with the forgiving explanation of their power-groupie behavior as "a need to link personal love to a general cause." As adolescents, Unity and her younger sister Jessica turned their rooms into political statements. Unity covered her walls with swastikas and a portrait of Hitler. Jessica decorated hers with hammers and sickles. They shouted party slogans at each other like cheerleaders for opposing teams. When the going got really hot, they wound up in a pillow fight. Jessica moved to the U.S. and stuck with the Communist Party until the end of the '50s. In the '60s she became a sudden capitalist success, thanks to her family saga Hons and Rebels and a classic expose of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death.

As it follows perverse characters, this family history sparkles on the surface. But The House of Mitford refuses to probe the darkness, and by treating its subjects with too much charity, reduces their lives and careers to a series of gossipy, entertaining, but ultimately trivial pursuits. Perhaps, given their predilections, this is the book they deserve.