Troublemaker excerpted in Town & Country magazine
November 25, 2025
Town & Country magazine has published an excerpt from Troublemaker titled “Jessica Mitford Was Raised to Be an Aristocrat. Instead, She Became a Communist: How a daughter of one of England’s most storied families ended up on the other side of the world—and the political spectrum—from her parents and infamous siblings.”
When Time magazine named her America’s “Queen of the Muckrakers” in 1970, Jessica Mitford was delighted. To this British aristocrat who became an American Communist, the mainstream recognition was a boost, especially since Mitford had only become a writer relatively late in life and was as surprised as anyone by her spectacular success. Most amusing, given her choice to discard wealth and throw over the rank of nobility, was being called a “queen.” She’d known Queen Elizabeth as Princess Lilibet and never been much impressed with the royals. “When the princesses were little, I tried to spread a rumor in London that they’d been born with webbed feet which was why nobody had ever seen them with their shoes off,” she once told her close friend, Maya Angelou. Queenliness combined with muck was a delicious contrast for someone who had a particular affinity for whatever was quirky, unconventional, contradictory, or odd. She also appreciated getting credit for reviving muckraking, a literary form that was nearly moribund when her blockbuster exposé of the funeral business, The American Way of Death, appeared in 1963; it was especially gratifying for someone completely self-taught to be so heralded as an expert.