Review in The Spectator
Anne Chisholm has written a review and reflection on Jessica Mitford and Troublemaker for The Spectator, in a piece titled, “Jessica was the only Mitford worth taking seriously…. But her unfailing humour does help lighten a solid new biography that focuses on her tireless campaign for social justice.”
“Can there really be any point in yet another fat book about one of the Mitford sisters? Their antics have been appearing in print since the late 1940s, when the eldest—clever, waspish Nancy—displayed their family eccentricities in her sparkling novel The Pursuit of Love. Since then, by a rough count, there have been 15 biographies, individual and joint, including three of both Nancy and Jessica, two vast compendiums of correspondence and five autobiographies by four of the sisters (Jessica wrote two). Have we not had enough of the unreconstructed paterfamilias Lord Redesdale (or Farv); of the Hons (airing) Cupboard, where the girls would take refuge at freezing Swinbrook, in Oxfordshire, to dream of love and escape; and of the nursery squabbles between Unity, drawn to Nazism, and Jessica, passionate about communism, leading to the former’s infatuation with Hitler and the latter’s near lifelong dedication to the party?
“Evidently not. Last year, “Outrageous,” the latest in a series of television and film portrayals (there have also been plays and a musical) gave us a glamorised account of the sisters’ romantic and political escapades, featuring pretty actresses in slinky satin frocks, blonde bobs and red lipstick. They were described by Vanity Fair as ‘gorgeous, passionate and defiant… the Kardashians of the era.’ Some found it ‘addictive’; to others, it was soap opera with added Nazis. This magazine found the accents not posh enough.
In the wake of all this, Carla Kaplan’s exhaustively researched and thorough account of Jessica (or Decca, as everyone knew her and Kaplan calls her throughout) comes as a welcome relief. The author is a distinguished American academic and cultural historian who has previously written about the important black writer Zora Neale Hurston and an excellent study of white women and the Harlem renaissance. She has read everything, including unpublished material, and interviewed everyone she could find. She has also had the backing of Decca’s children. Her credentials are evident and her intention clear: she sets out to establish once and for all that Decca’s life revolved around a determination to work for social justice in general and the abolition of racial prejudice in particular—or, as Kaplan puts it, to transform herself ‘from aristocrat to activist.’ In fact, she managed to remain a unique combination of both.”