Troublemaker featured in Boston Globe
Kate Tuttle writes about Troublemaker for The Boston Globe in a new piece entitled, “Crossing borders and making (good) trouble, Jessica Mitford was a model for our times.”
One of the first things that struck Carla Kaplan about Jessica Mitford was her voice — not in speaking but on the page. “She has one of the most recognizable voices in the history of English writing. You read anything by Decca [Mitford’s lifelong nickname] and you instantly know it’s her,” says Kaplan, whose book “Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford” (Harper) comes out this week.
Mitford is known today mostly for her books “The American Way of Death,” a keen-eyed expose of the funeral business published in 1963, and her 1960 family memoir “Hons and Rebels,” about her aristocratic English upbringing among a brood of dazzling siblings. But as Kaplan chronicles, her political views were paramount and consistent. She eloped to Spain to aid the anti-fascist cause and to follow Esmond Romilly, her distant cousin and first husband. The couple moved to the US during Hitler’s rise to power, and after Romilly was killed in the war (“she never stopped blaming the fascists for [his] death,” Kaplan says), Mitford became a fixture in anti-fascist and anti-racist activism.