Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating but flawed
Review: The Mitford sisters, six girls from an aristocratic English family, are profiled in this book. They led interesting lives (two were friends of Hitler, one ran away to the Spanish Civil War with Winston Churchill's communist nephew, one became the Duchess of Devonshire, one wrote best-selling novels based on her family, and one, apparently the sensible one, lived quietly), but this is a family that appeared to court disaster. The story is a tragic one involving a suicide attempt, permanent estrangement, and a great deal of pain within the family. It's fascinating material for a biographer to work with, yet this book is disappointing. Lovell tell us what the sisters did, but rarely delves deeply into why they did these things. And she lets one sister, Diana, an apologist for Hitler, off the hook, saying that Diana is incapable of lying. Well, perhaps that's true, but I think a more insightful look at her character might have suggested that she is also incapable of seeing the truth about her actions and those of the men she followed. I hope that another biographer will delve more deeply into these women's motives and tell us why such gifted women, with every advantage in life, were so self-destructive.
Rating: 
Summary: The Mitfords make fascinating reading
Review: The Mitfords - six sisters, their brother and two parents make for fascinating reading and there have been a few biographies, autobiographies and of course the semi-autobiographical novels of Nancy which have managed to fuel the publics desire to hear more. Lovell's biography of the family is more than just the most recent book. It makes use of all the sisters letters and notes (access hasn't always been allowed in the past - especially to Decca's private papers) and it also helps to shed light on the positives and negatives of all the works which have been published in the Mitford collection. Lovell , whose work I very much admire, has the art of discussing with judging - either her subjects or their previous biographers. I feel she leaves the judgement to the reader to make, and in this case it is a very good thing. The Mitford family had a very controversial set of characters. Nancy with her 'teases' was perhaps the most outrageous within the family, but publically there was the divorce of Diana in the 1930's followed by her seemingly long affair with Moseley (the leader of the British Fascists) and her later marriage and unapologetic support for him and their cause. Unity Mitford is famous, or should I say infamous, for her long friendship with Hitler. Decca ran away from home with her cousin at the age of about 18 and went to Spain to support the Communists in the Spanish Civil War of 1936. She later married her cousin Esmond and went to live in America where she remained very much cut off from her family - mostly it seems for reasons of her own. The other two sisters, Pamela and Debo led quieter lives and in Debo's case only marginally less interesting. All in all the girls were just fascinating indeed. Lovell starts her book with a brief summary of what isn't going to be in it. The introduction covers the material which has been done before (try the biography by Jonathon Guiness, Diana's son, if you want to read more on this) and then the material which _will_ be in it. Much of the book is rehashed to some extent - well it has to be doesn't it as there is only so much new material and much of the old stuff is just as interesting. It also needs to be there to shed light on the new material which Lovell includes later. Each chapter is done in date order so all the sisters are followed up in each section, although for obvious reasons some are mentioned more than others - for instance, Unity dominates the early thirties, Decca, the later thirties, This new material includes the use of Decca's papers and letters, and much of this is made use of in the latter portion of the book. Whereas there seems to be very little about Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire or Pamela the quiet 'rural' Mitford. I suppose with the Duchess still alive there might be problems with using too much material on her or maybe, like Pamela there is not that much controversial which would make it interesting. Nevertheles, what is used is well worth it as it gives insight into the problems the landowning peers had in the 1930's with death taxes and inheritance. If nothing else this family is deadly funny. Nancy showed that in her novels Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate ( and her other novels of course but those two really are her very best work). The family seem to have an inordinate amount of charm, shart intellegence and wit which was present from their childhood. Despite none of them having more than a cursory formal education, they were taught by a series of governesses with varying levels of commitment (one spent the whole time teaching them to play a card game called Racing Demon) - they all seemed to have taken on very formidable careers and excelled at them. Lovell is unable to show quite why they all excelled as they did - perhaps it was all hereditary as they had exceptional grandparents - but she certainly does expose a very talented family and a funny one. This book is a wonderfully easy read about a wonderfully funny interetsting family.
Rating:
Summary: Sisters, Daughters, Rebels, Lovers
Review: The Sisters is a multigenerational story of one of the most dazzlingly complex families ever to grace the pages of Burke's Peerage. The seven children of the second Lord Redesdale were raised in a fairly conventional upper class British manner, with servants and governesses. As five of the six daughters emerged into adulthood, she found quickly found fame (or notoriety). Nancy became a gifted novelist, essayist, and biographer; Diana started as a society hostess and ended as wife of one of the most controversial men in British politics and as an undaunted Hitler apologist; Unity went even further by becoming a Hitler acolyte who shot herself when World War II broke out; Jessica (Decca)also entered politics by becoming a passionate Communist and later a gifted social critic and muckraker; Deborah (Debo) was slightly more traditional in that she became a Duchess and chatelaine of one of England's grandest country houses. Only the second daugher Pam lived a retiring life, and the only son Tom's career was cut short by his death in World War II. The Sisters is a good introduction to the Mitfords if you aren't familiar with them. Even if you are a long time Mitford aficionado it's a valuable read because it covers all the sisters without favoring or slighting any. This balanced look at the Mitfords will stand out because so much of what has been written about them is biased towards/against one or more of the sisters. Mary Lovell spent a lot of time untangling the real family history, which is important because so much of the sisters' stories has gotten entangled with Nancy's fictional Radletts (from "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate") and with Jessica's imaginative memoir "Hons and Rebels". By the time you finish the book you will be quite fond of all of the sisters and their extended family, and thanks to Ms. Lovell's inclusion of information on their descendants, you will feel like a friend who has known the family for two or three generations.
Rating: 
Summary: A Spell Is Cast
Review: The Sisters is an enticing book that pulls you in and you dont want to ever stop reading it. The Mitford Family was a sad family that threw away their many talents and opportunities. As an upper class english family related to such notables as Winston Churchill, with a moderate family income , and outgoing fascinating personalities they should have had the world by the tail. Instead, one sister attempted sucicide and caused serious brain damage, another sister spent part of the second world war in prison due to her support of Hitler, and 3 others loved men who made their personal life miserable with infidelty. Debo was the only one who seemed to live up to her potential. This was where the book was weak, why was their so little information on Debo, Duchess of Devonshire? And I wished the author had offered some kind of insight as to where in their background the sisters developed such extreme political views, 2 were supporters of Hitler, and 1 was a communist. The author never offers information as to what went so wrong in their childhood. But all in all it's definitely worth reading. I am now hooked on reading more books about the Mitford Family.
Rating:
Summary: The Incredible Mitford Family
Review: They have to be real; they are too improbable for fiction. If the sisters had been born a few generations later, their faces would be as familiar to us as Princess Diana and their lifestyles would be the joy of "People" magazine. Even in the pre-tabloid days, they managed to corner an ocean of newsprint. Any one of the six sisters and their parents merit and have had individual biographies. Put them all together in one book whets the reader's appetite for more. Lord and Lady Redesdale had to be and were larger than life to produce their remarkable brood. Lady Redesdale (Sydney), as a young woman looks for all the world like an Edwardian Angelina Jolie. She was a calm, devoted mother with the sang froid of royalty. Lord Redesdale (David) was a ruggedly handsome, wildly eccentric, totally English Lord. He and his entire family lived around and through his volcanic rages. He could truly be called a tyrant with a heart of a bon bon. His daughters' suitors were "Sewers," and he didn't believe in more than rudimentary education for women causing life-long bitterness in daughters Nancy and Jessica. Though the family (and Ms. Lovell) insists it was a "game," Lord R. would set his bloodhound on his daughters to find them when they rambled the huge estate. All of the sisters were beautiful. I realize this is an overworked word, but in their cases, it was amazingly true-not one ugly duckling in the bunch. All except Nancy inherited their father's blazing blue eyes and their mother's lovely golden hair. Nancy was a green-eyed brunette, elegant as a greyhound. All had innate writing ability, and Nancy and Jessica were extraordinarily successful authors; Nancy with novels and biographies ("Love in a Cold Climate") and Jessica more the journalist ("An American way of Death"). Diana, the great beauty, first married a Guinness heir and then abandoned him for the love of her life, fascist and greatly hated Sir Oswald Mosley. She and her husband spent three years during World War II in prison as traitors. Strange Unity developed a fixation on Adolph Hitler and fascism. She announced she would kill herself if war broke out between her beloved England and Germany. When that event occurred, Unity shot herself in the head and tragically lived, mentally impaired for another six years. Jessica (Decca), the fieriest of the girls, started her "Running Away" fund when she was eight years old. When she was 19, she eloped with Winston Churchill's nephew (age 17) to serve with the Communist revolutionaries in Spain. Heads of State searched frantically for the youngsters, and when they were found, Jessica prevailed. Pamela was always labeled the "quiet" one; she loved the country and horses, married a brilliant man and remained excellent friends with him even after they were divorced and he subsequently married five more times. Deborah (Debo), most like her mother, calm and gracious became the grandest lady of them all, the Duchess of Devonshire. Ms. Lovell's scholarship and research are impeccable and she writes in a very lively, but even-toned manner. I felt a little too much space was awarded Jessica; I would have liked Nancy to have equal time. Deborah was very discreetly handled; perhaps because she was still living at the time the book was written and had strong opinions (and probably control) of what was written. It is rare that a biography is termed a "page-turner," but that is exactly what "The Sisters" is. Very enjoyable. -sweetmolly-
Rating:
Summary: Honorables and Horrors
Review: This biography of the Mitford sisters stands up nicely to the family-sanctioned House of Mitford by the Guinness's. Here the emphasis is not so much on the delightful eccentricities of the Radfords and family, chubb clubbing et al, but on the various and extreme ways in which these children of minor aristrocracy and great precocity diverged from their intended paths. Here we see Nancy not just as the author of rather light-weight novels, but also as a serious historian and important woman of letters. Unity's relationship with Hitler is fleshed out, bringing forth real evidence of her love and devotion to not only the man, but also his cause. Decca (Jessica) gets more notice here, both as a rather naive communist during the 20s and 30s, but also as a chronicler of the social mores of American life and death. Debo, still today the Duchess of Devonshire, beautiful and determined, tries to hold the center while yet another sister Pamela leads a more conventional life. Even more notorious than Unity's infatuation with Hitler and subsequent sucide attempt, was Diana, married to the leader of Britain's Fascist party, Oswald Mosely, with whom she spend several years in jail during WWII. These beautiful, brilliant, individuals are each given their due, and not eclipsed by Nancy, the most pubic of them. This is a fine book for lovers of the Mitfords, for they are so curious, so peculiar and so varied, that one must either despise them for their obvious wrong-headedness, or love them madly despite it all. As the Mitford girls themselves would say, "Do admit. It is lovely to be lovely one." Still and all, the best source of biographical information on this fascinating family are their own writings, particularly Nancy's "Love in a Cold Climate" and "The Pursiut of Love," and Jessica's "Hons and Rebels." The Mitfords get fair treatment here, even if it does make them seem just a shade duller than they were, or than we want them to have been.
Rating:
Summary: A readable and entertaining look at social history/biography
Review: This carefully researched and constructed biography of the six Mitford sisters, Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah, and their brother, Tom, is a fascinating look not only of their lives but at the time in which they lived. The reader is drawn into the world of minor British aristocracy and is treated to characters who, although somewhat eccentric at times, seem much like people we know: Parents are well-intentioned if somewhat misled, children are willful and spoiled. Life, however, is frivolous and carefree in an increasingly dangerous and threatening world. It's easy to understand where Nancy got her sense of humor and her ability to write social satire -- it was bred into the bone. It's also understandable (and not at all uncommon) that the older siblings found some measure of success while the younger ones behaved like the over-indulged, spoiled children they were and never seemed to cease to be. The reader who remembers (and the student of) the early- and mid-20th century will recognize the famous names that wander through these pages with the infamous family: Aly Khan, Winston Churchill, Katharine Graham, Diana Cooper, Evelyn Waugh and more -- it's a star-studded group of friends, relatives and acquaintances that touch and often seriously influence the lives of the Mitfords. I loved this book. The story is fascinating and almost surreal as it unfolds through the girls' schooling, debutante years and various adult exploits played against the backdrop of the developing World War and its aftermath. Lovell has done a superb job of presenting the zeigeist of their era and their lives in a readable and entertaining text.
Rating: 
Summary: Hitler? Who knew? Biography as blather.
Review: This is a dreadful biography of a dreadful but fascinating family. I give it one star because the author is able to put one word in front of the other and walk us through her story, but more often she stumbles on her own muddled thinking. I suppose I could get past the "Town & Country" prose, and the obsessive geneological boredom of rich and titled cousins who are of no consequence other than to pour on the peerage, but the author, Mary S. Lovell, turns a blind eye to the horrors of fascism which two and one half of that wild and crazy Mitford family followed, and that is hard to digest. The crimes of fascism were already evident when the sisters and brother Tom came of age. Ms. Lovell may not want to recognize it but the fascists in Germany and in Italy were aleady beating people and murdereding the innocent. They were the enemies of the very civilization which the Mitford's enjoyed so frivolously. By refusing to judge her subjects, the author passes judgment on herself, as an apologist for the British fascist views of that time, and the comfortabe reactionary beliefs of the Mitford class. The author's attempts to justify those Mitford sisters and brother Tom who were attracted by fascism are disingenuous. We are never prepared psychologically to understand Diana's infatuation with Oswald Mosely, the British Fascist, nothing in the book prepares us for this "great love story," between the gorgeous Diana and the hateful, rabble rousing jack booted Mosely. Despite the author's incredible claim that Diana's imprisonment by the British authorities during the war was worse than a German concentration camp, Diana was living at the Ritz compared to the Jews in the camps, those she and her dear husband would have had exterminated. Beautiful Diana was either dim witted or deluded, or both. The claim that all their fascism was an effort to fight Stalin's communism is bogus. All the sisters had courage, but in them it is less a virtue than a matter of believing that they own the world and can do anything in it, so they will. Jessica, awash in doctrinaire socialism, and naive when it came to communism, comes off best as a human being capable of compassion, but no thanks to the author who regards her with a jaundiced eye. Jessica (or Decca) had a strong sense of social justice and produced excellent books and lived a productive life as a muckraking journalist. She alone does not seem to have been deluded by the family myths that witty sister Nancy created in her charming novels. The author clearly has less tolerance for Jessica,she devotes pages of disapproval to her, imagine, she ran away with a Socialist Society boy - tut tut tut - a black sheep cousin of Churchill - and thereby caused her family such pain and embarassament. She is the object of the author's primary disapproval, as oppossed to the deluded Diana or Unity. Jessica, or Decca as she is called her, committed the unpardonable crim of concern for unwashed humanity. The beautiful fascist Diana, and the spunky Hitler worshipping Unity, who were prepared to turn their country and the world over to Hitler, come off as dear little madcaps. Nancy,who had a natural sense of decency, was the wittiest and most charming of all the sisters, as evidenced in her delightful novels, but despite her personal qualities, she remains a minor figure in literature, no matter how one tries to puff up her reputation with PBS miniseries. She is not even a close runner up to her good friend Evelyn Waugh. He was a self satisfied bigot, a reactionary snob, but nevertheless a great writer. This biographer does not see that the roots of this family's ideological disease were planted by the ever so adorable and eccentric "farve" - the father who hated all foreigners, and Sydney, the mother whose cozy country house snobbery made her children feel that they deserved all the goodies that life offered. Fascism must have seemed one fine way to protect their privilaged lives during the Great Depression, or if you prefer, my subtitle for this book,"High Life In The Big Slump." The author would have us regard her subjects beliefs as a form of British upper class eccentricity, rather than what it was; callous, vicious, and heartless; a lack of empathy for others that grows tiresome. For most of the Mitfords it was more fun to shock the middle class than to think through their beliefs and actions, and honestly examine the world they lived in. No, they were not responsible for Hitler, but they were part of the environment, like the Cliveden House set and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that helped make the death camps possible, either through indifference,ignorance, or loathing for those who "are not out kind". When you cannot trust the author's point of view, or lack thereof, or her sense of history, how can you trust anything about her book? I felt a bit like Papa Mitford, wanting to banish the book by flinging it into the ancestral fireplace and shouting, "Sewer!". It is unusual these days to read such slavishly uncritical work, a product of the author identifying too closely with her subjects and attempting to justify their lives, without really coming to understand them, their strengths and their great weaknesses, and placing them in some kind of social and psychological context. Ms. Lovell is so determined to be fair to her subjects that she is unfair to her readers and to history. A poor historian, a good gossip, and a disgraceful thinker. Reader, pass this one by.
Rating:
Summary: Definitely Worth Reading !
Review: This is a standard biography, i.e. it starts at the very beginning, lays the groundwork for an understanding of the Mitford sisters' social class and era, then proceeds through to the present, where only two sisters remain alive. If you're looking for deconstructionism, you won't find it here -- Lovell approaches her subjects with apparent objectivity. In fact, she refutes many criticisms offered by earlier biographers, such as the widely-held assumption that Unity Mitford was Hitler's mistress. At the same time, Lovell is clear that the family's friendliness toward (and Unity and Diana's unabashed embrace of) Naziism is more than politically incorrect seen from the standpoint of today. Lovell filled in many gaps in my knowledge about the life of the upper class in Britain in the pre- and WWII period, making it easier to understand what has always seemed to me to be the naivete of their politics . . .such as the mother continuing to insist that "Hitler was a personable, charming and thoroughly nice man" based on a few pre-war social engagements. I love the comment from one British peer (and friend of Jack) that, during his tenure as president, Kennedy did for sex what Eisenhower did for golf. The book moves quickly through less interesting details. It leaves one with a strong picture of the life of this amazingly diverse family -- and a better understanding of their class and the era in which they lived. I recommend this book highly to biography-lovers and WWII buffs.
Rating:
Summary: The best kind of biography
Review: This is my second Mary S. Lovell book (the first being 'A Rage to Live') and I am in awe of her talents both as a biographer and a writer. She is at first extremely thorough in her research and meticulous in her fact checking, but she also has the ability to present her subjects in a thoroughly readable and quite thrilling style. And she chooses such subjects! there is never a dull moment in these pages. I thought I'd read all I needed to about the Mitfords but there is so much more to learn from this book. The book also places its subjects in the broader mileiu and thus teaches us a lot about the period leading up to WWII and the (now surprising) attitudes of many Britishers to Hitler and Fascism before he revealed himself to be the monster we know.
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