Words for Wednesday: The Sisters, The Saga of the Mitford Family

The Sisters, The Saga of the Mitford Family is one of those books that is opening me up to a whole new world of further reading.  I am finding it hard to believe that I have not heard about this family before or that my mother never mentioned them.  I feel really sad that she is not around to read this as I know she would fall in love with it.  Although I suspect that when I search her shelves at home I will find at least something about or by one of the family members.

I normally don't read non-fiction but stumbled upon this book last summer when I was in my "must stock up" phase at Barnes & Nobel.  As nice and novel as the Kindles/Nooks are, I can't help but be sad that in the future I won't be able to spend hours wandering through the bookstore randomly picking up anything that catches my eye.

ANYWAY, the Mitford sisters are/were a group of real life sisters growing up in England in the 10s,20s,30s and who were young women in the 40s.  Though the book is fact it reads like fiction as we find out how involved they were on the world stage.  As the back cover reads, "Jessica was a communist; Nancy was one of the best-selling novelists of her day; beautiful Diana married the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; and Unity, a close friend of Hitler, shot herself in the head when England and Germany declared war."  What  the back cover doesn't say is that Unity practically dated Hitler and that both her sister and mother were his close friends.  It also doesn't say that the girls were distant cousins with Winston Churchill and saw him regularly.  In fact, at one point in the book Jessica receives $500 from him only to turn around and donate it to an American Communist fund.  Also in the story is Jessica's brother-in-law who marries JFK's older sister, Evelyn Waugh (who wrote Brideshead Revisited), Gaston Palewski (a man who was Charles de Gaulle's right hand man), and so on.

As I have been reading along I often find myself thinking, "No way!  This can't all be true."  It's definitely one of those books that has me constantly looking up history on Wiki.  Even if the book wasn't full of "name dropping" it would still be fascinating as the women were all intelligent, talented, and beautiful and full of creativity.  As young children two of the girls created their own language in order to communicate in secret.  One daughter wrote several novels.  All were quite passionate about the politics of the time and as teens it is written that two of the sisters that shared a room divided it down the middle with chalk with one half being decorated with posters of Hitler and Nazi symbols while the other half had pictures of Lenin and Marx.  This all about when they were 12 and 13.  Even if you don't care about history the love lives of the girls is quite shocking and interesting considering the times they lived in.

I don't want to tell you everything but I do encourage you to at least look this family up online.  Absolutely intriguing.