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mborer23's review
4.0
Six sisters who were beautiful, brilliant, given to quarrels with each other, and subject to dark passions, Nancy, Diana, Unity, Jessica, Pamela, and Deborah Mitford achieved international fame. A sort of group biography, this book talks about not only the lives of the Mitford sisters (and their brother), but about how they were absolutely uniquely positioned in history. The author was lucky enough to interview some of the sisters, and therefore witnessed the legendary Mitford charm first-hand.
ultramarine316's review against another edition
4.0
I picked this up having never read any of Nancy Mitford's books because it promised an interesting look at the political climate in pre WWII England, and it delivered in that area. By examining one family, whose mebers seemed to rush headlong into various political extreams, the book really does paint a picture of the time and place.
However, if, like me, you're not already a fan Nancy Mitford's fictionalized versions of her family (who maybe are really entertaining for all I know), it does get a bit tedious to spend time with these fucking people. Thompson tells us about the Mitford mystic and the Mitford charm and the Mitford idiom, but I guess charm is something you can only experience first hand.
There is something interesting, in a literary way, about a group of sisters. (Thomson compares them to the Bennets in several places. I was put in mind of a bitchier version of the March sisters.)
But otherwise they just sound like they got away with being crappy people because they were rich and pretty and whenever Thompson tried to explain why something they did was so unique and charming, it made me dislike them even more. For example, there are several points where Thompson mentions some way in which one of the sisters was a huge hypocrite and says something like "such was the irreducable paradox of her psyche, the irreconcileable duality," and I'm like, "Sounds like she was just a huge hypocrite. What you just described in that example is someone being a huge hypocrite".
However, if, like me, you're not already a fan Nancy Mitford's fictionalized versions of her family (who maybe are really entertaining for all I know), it does get a bit tedious to spend time with these fucking people. Thompson tells us about the Mitford mystic and the Mitford charm and the Mitford idiom, but I guess charm is something you can only experience first hand.
There is something interesting, in a literary way, about a group of sisters. (Thomson compares them to the Bennets in several places. I was put in mind of a bitchier version of the March sisters.)
But otherwise they just sound like they got away with being crappy people because they were rich and pretty and whenever Thompson tried to explain why something they did was so unique and charming, it made me dislike them even more. For example, there are several points where Thompson mentions some way in which one of the sisters was a huge hypocrite and says something like "such was the irreducable paradox of her psyche, the irreconcileable duality," and I'm like, "Sounds like she was just a huge hypocrite. What you just described in that example is someone being a huge hypocrite".
sevenlefts's review
3.0
I read a review of this in Library Journal and thought I'd give it a try. I can't believe I'd never heard of these six interesting and enigmatic women from the Mitford family.
But then it turned out I had. Middle sister Jessica was the author of The American Way of Death, a book I haven't read but have heard much about. And youngest sister Deborah was the Duchess of Devonshire, whose husband's home, Chatsworth House, features prominently in stories about stately homes and landscape architecture and whose family was intertwined with the Kennedys. And eldest sister Nancy was the author of famous books The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Who knew they were all related? Apparently a lot of people did. But not me.
The book is written from a British perspective, and the author makes a lot of assumptions about the reader's knowledge of 20th century British history and it's primary figures. I had to stop from time to time to look people and events up. Because these sisters were everywhere and knew everyone -- and had constantly shifting alliances among each other, and with their parents.
The writing is based on documentary evidence: interviews, newspaper items, an unending stream of letters and even the novels and books that the sisters wrote. There is also much speculation on the author's part about the nature of the sister's relationships and their motivations in how they acted with each other. It was interesting, but sometimes I felt the author went a bit far with her theories. It felt a bit prying and uneven, especially since the author had met a few of the sisters and not the others.
Imagine a family in which one sister lunches with Adolph Hitler on multiple occasions, while another just a few years later, already a widow in her early 20s, meets with her husband's uncle, Winston Churchill, during a visit to the White House. The mind reels at all the complicated relationships between The Six -- the author, the countrywoman, the fascist, the nazi, the communist and the duchess.
But then it turned out I had. Middle sister Jessica was the author of The American Way of Death, a book I haven't read but have heard much about. And youngest sister Deborah was the Duchess of Devonshire, whose husband's home, Chatsworth House, features prominently in stories about stately homes and landscape architecture and whose family was intertwined with the Kennedys. And eldest sister Nancy was the author of famous books The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Who knew they were all related? Apparently a lot of people did. But not me.
The book is written from a British perspective, and the author makes a lot of assumptions about the reader's knowledge of 20th century British history and it's primary figures. I had to stop from time to time to look people and events up. Because these sisters were everywhere and knew everyone -- and had constantly shifting alliances among each other, and with their parents.
The writing is based on documentary evidence: interviews, newspaper items, an unending stream of letters and even the novels and books that the sisters wrote. There is also much speculation on the author's part about the nature of the sister's relationships and their motivations in how they acted with each other. It was interesting, but sometimes I felt the author went a bit far with her theories. It felt a bit prying and uneven, especially since the author had met a few of the sisters and not the others.
Imagine a family in which one sister lunches with Adolph Hitler on multiple occasions, while another just a few years later, already a widow in her early 20s, meets with her husband's uncle, Winston Churchill, during a visit to the White House. The mind reels at all the complicated relationships between The Six -- the author, the countrywoman, the fascist, the nazi, the communist and the duchess.
playitasitlays's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.0
I just didn’t love this book. Its narrative was scattered and only held together by the fact of familial ties. The author seemed to play favorites among the sisters. She centered Nancy’s fiction as if it was truth and appeared overly sympathetic to Diane and Unity, eschewing their own agency and political affiliations. She also ascribed feelings and emotions when she had little to no evidence to ground her claims.
claudiamccarron's review
3.0
The Mitfords are fascinating and Thompson is a talented writer. But (and your mileage may vary on this), I felt that she spent too much time dissecting their motivations, justifying their actions, etc. It's not that we shouldn't feel empathy for them, in spite of some of the appalling things they did/said, but I would have preferred a lighter touch that trusted the audience to draw their own conclusions.
kitnotmarlowe's review against another edition
Do not fucking read this.
Based on other reviews, if I had gone into this book expecting to learn anything about the Mitfords, I would have stopped reading after 10 pages. Despite knowing about the Mitfords, I only got through 29 pages (the end of the introduction) before I gave up. It's never a good sign when I check community reviews before finishing a nonfiction book, and The Six was no exception.
Laura Thompson looked at her cast of six women who lived six different lives across decades and countries, thought about how she wanted to structure her book, and then said, "Nah."
Rather than dividing the book by era or sister, she throws everything and the kitchen sink into a blender, hoping for the best but achieving the worst. From the prologue on, the narration jumps between generations, themes, and families, with little regard for readers. What aspires to be gossipy and binge-worthy ends up full of meandering digressions within digressions. A rotten turducken of a book that befuddles readers into frustration. Thompson jumps around so much in the introduction that I'm not sure she could write four pages on the same topic. Losing your readers before they even reach the first chapter? A bad look. So many facts and figures are thrown around willy-nilly to obscure the fact that this book's central thesis appears not to be that the Mitfords could only exist in one specific context, belonging to a social class of impoverished aristocrats in a dying empire, but that the Mitfords were pretty cool, and we do want to be them.
Speaking of wanting to be a Mitford, aspirational is the best way I can describe the writing style. I haven't read anything by any of the sisters, but Thompson provides enough examples and references to Nancy's novels that I'm confident I could recognize a page from any of their work in a blind test.
Perhaps I'm unable to recognize the charm of such a style. There's something hollow about a homage I find frankly a little embarrassing, the way it is when the straightest woman you know is down atrocious for a white man who hasn't drank water since elementary school and will lie about his political leanings to sleep with her, like Laura, girl, get UP! You're embarrassing yourself! Not only is she afflicted with a terminal case of Mitford Mania, but she has blisteringly obvious biases toward the sisters. This is subjective beyond what the bounds of historical nonfiction should be.
Thompson already has a biography of Nancy and admires her as a writer, but Deborah and Diana are her favourites because they're the only sisters Thompson met in person. Jessica is a stupid extremist who was the only sister to lose her beauty in middle age because she's a filthy pinko. Pamela is nonexistent, which seems like what she would have wanted. And then there's Unity, but I'll get back to her later.
Now, let's return to Jessica. Thompson disdains Jessica in the way that English people born in a specific era or class do, which I've dubbed Tory Prion Disease.
Jessica, a communist, is a hypocrite for daring to show her family The Brown Book of Hitler Terror while, at the same time, Stalin was enacting his own terrors upon the Soviet Union (actually, on that note, I do not want to hear Laura Thompson's takes on the Holodomor. I do not want to know). Jessica, who never met Stalin and later condemned him—which her sisters cannot say for the objects of their own political affections—should be held accountable for every single casualty of the Great Purge, but Diana can be excused for not knowing about the Holocaust. The same Diana, who went on the radio in 1989, called Hitler a "fascinating" person with "extraordinary, mesmeric eyes" and said that of the six million victims of the Holocaust, "Oh, I don't think it was that many."
Jessica's communist cousin-husband, Esmond Romilly, who had his own flaws, is the devil incarnate for, uh, (checks notes) criticizing the British public school system, eloping with Jessica, and volunteering to fight alongside the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, despite Britain's official non-interventionist policy masking conservative hopes for Franco's victory. Meanwhile, Diana's odious husband, Oswald Mosley, literally founded the British Union of Fascists and is still described as striking and magnetic nearly a century later. Jessica withered into a middle-aged hag, whereas Diana was the most beautiful woman of her generation. Sidenote: Why is Thompson, at her advanced age, still associating beauty with good character like a child under double digits? Thompson undermines Jessica every chance she gets, pitting all of her sisters against her to prove her point. Every chance she gets, Thompson undermines Jessica, pitting all her sisters against her to make a point. While Nancy's heavily autobiographical novels are taken as gospel truth, Jessica's personal memoir apparently isn't a reliable source. Thompson can't even muster up pity when discussing how Jessica outlived two of her children. Absolute ghoul.
All I know is that if I had to choose between one sister who praised Hitler 40 years after his death and another sister who was involved in the American Civil Rights movement, my choice would be obvious, and it would not be the same as Laura Thompson's.
Unfortunately, we now have to discuss Unity. Thompson's portrayal of her is...confused. She is both an overgrown child in the body of a beautiful woman (rest in piss, Unity Mitford; you would have loved Poor Things, or whatever) who treats Nazism as a fun schoolyard game and a devoted, even militant Nazi who is fully aware of her actions. I have no doubt that Unity was a complicated and contradictory woman who, like her family and other British aristocrats, embraced fascism if it meant continuing their parasitic way of life and who chose allegiance to Hitler as one would choose a sports team to root for all to distinguish herself from her communist sister. Both of these things can be true, yet Thompson deploys one or the other depending on whether or not she wants Unity to be sympathetic.
Fascism was real to her, but not the systematic mass murder, just the tea with Hitler, the beautiful synchronicity of thousands of right arms raised in a perfect salute. Unity cannot be held accountable for gleefully egging on one of, if not the greatest, tragedies of the twentieth century because she was simply a silly, uneducated girl who had no idea what her crush on Hitler would lead to.
Except, of course, she did. Thompson makes the audacious claim that Unity couldn't possibly be antisemitic because she socialized with a select few Jewish acquaintances. After all, she was happy to stay in an apartment belonging to a Jewish couple on permanent vacation. The same Unity Valkyrie Mitford who, in 1935, wrote a letter to the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, which read: "The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. We think with joy of the day when we will be able to say England for the English! Out with the Jews! Heil Hitler! P.S. Please publish my name in full, I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater." You want to argue that this woman was not antisemitic? (The word antisemitism does not appear in the index.) Laura Thompson, you have worms in your brain.
Also, while this is not one of Laura Thompson's many sins, it is a myth about Unity that I feel obligated to debunk. There's always a big hullabaloo about how she was conceived in Swastika, Ontario, and I must defend northern Ontario.
Swastika, a mining town incorporated in 1908, was named after the Hindu symbol of good fortune rather than what it would later represent because it was, once again, a gold mining site.
There were German ties to the swastika as an Aryan symbol going back to Schliemann at Troy in the late 1870s, and it was used as an incidental symbol of autocratic government during the 1920 Kapp Putsch. However, it wasn't adopted by the Nazis as their primary political symbol until 1920, and the party didn't come into power until 1933, almost 20 years after Unity's birth.
I know this comes up as a point of discussion about her, but it's just a terrible coincidence. Yes, Unity's father was a fascist from a fascist family who named her in the hopes of forming an Anglo-German alliance during his life. However, he did not choose to conceive his Nazi super-daughter in Swastika as part of a larger evil plan. David & Sydney Mitford travelled frequently to Canada because they owned a gold claim near Swastika. Thank you for coming to my Tedtalk.
Finally, as long as the Anglosphere dismisses Mifordian fascism as a quirk of the aristocracy because they wrote about it in a remarkably unserious manner, we allow the myth of the benevolent, well-dressed, well-spoken, and well-educated fascist to endure. Their political views are easily dismissed as frivolous or eccentric—affected rather than deeply held convictions. However, you cannot make that argument when the eccentricity in question is FASCISM. I'm glad Unity was such an awful shot that she couldn't kill herself properly and spent 9 years suffering from a bullet in her brain. May I live to see a world that condemns her and her miserable, cowardly, shit-for-brains family. Amen.
cowiealexandra's review against another edition
3.0
An interesting if overly indulgent portrait of very complex women. It is abundantly clear at times that. the author greatly admires the Mitford sisters or some aspect of what they represent, and as a result the book often shyed away from genuinely critically examining their actions. The structure was off-putting and hard to follow as it was not organised chronologically or by sister. It felt more like a well-captured vignette of "Mitfordian" life (as defined mostly by Nancy, Jessica, and Diana) than an in-depth autobiography of the six sisters.
graceduncan's review against another edition
2.0
A highly researched and readable, but highly biased biography of the Mitford sisters. She gives the fascist side of the family too much grace and paints Nancy and Jessica as villains. When what the girls‘ records of events go against Thompson’s narrative and depiction of them she conveniently uses the phrase: ‘did she really believe what she said’. This is used liberally when talking about Diana and Unity’s fascist leanings and also when the other girls show any affection to their mother and other family members.