The Mitford sisters are the "aristocratic Kardashian sisters" from the twentieth century: six crazy women, each on her own mind, who simply lived their own lives, while constantly unknowingly shocking the public.
In the UK, the "Mitford girls" have become a phenomenon, the personification of the "wolfhound century", the era of a sharp change in public attitudes, political ideas and just surrounding realities, although the last of them died in 2014, to this day they are talked about and written about, the Mitfords remain the subject of discussion, the object of journalistic investigations, documentary prose, TV movies, personalities for comparisons, pros, heroines of novels, musicals, I would not be surprised if a comic book is made about them soon, and the series for six seasons is simply- it still begs, given the amount of very different material about their lives.
I knew absolutely nothing about these girls until, in 2018, Lyubov Sum translated their biography of 2015, created by Laura Thompson, a famous English biographer, with whom Russian readers could get acquainted by reading the biography of Agatha Christie by her authorship.
"The Six", which is exactly what the book is called in the original, and, in my opinion, this is a much more appropriate title than the Russian-language version, is not Thompson's first work about the Mitfords, twelve years before she had already plunged into the intricacies of the destinies of members of this family, working on the biography of the eldest of the sisters, the writer Nancy Mitford.
Six Mitford sisters - six different destinies, six different characteristics:
- Nancy is a childless writer who once married an unloved man in order not to become an old maid, a friend of Evelyn Waugh;
- Pamela - after another miscarriage, she became a child hater, and after another lover of her husband, she changed him for a life with a dear friend;
- Diana is a bright beauty who abandoned her lovely husband Guinness for the sake of passion for the leader of the British fascists, Oslvald Mosley, because of whom she spent several years in prison;
- Unity - obsessed with the ideas of National Socialism ran away from mom and dad to Herr Hitler, becoming his close friend, and perhaps even more;
- Jessica, obsessed with the ideas of communism, ran away from her mom and dad to another continent, where she actively fought for the rights of everyone and wrote books about how she was offended by her family, because they were all Nazis;
-Deborah is the Duchess of Devonshire, who proved that the aristocracy can be with a human face.
Of course, they have a mountain in common for six of them: cheating husbands, miscarriages, dead children, endless press attention, condemnation from the public, disagreements with parents and among themselves, great love for the only brother - Tom, politics, literature, and so on, which can both unite and permanently separate people originally connected by blood ties.
Although it is generally believed that everyone deserves the world to know his story, to be honest, the bright lives of Nancy, Diana, Unity and Jessica overshadow the "landowner life" of Pamela and Deborah, who, quite likely, would never have gone down in history if their sisters were not Fascist Diana and Nazi Unity, therefore, not much time is given to them on the pages of "Imagine six Girls", so sometimes, reading, you start to wonder: "eh, what about two more?" or you just forget which of them married whom and what they are known for.
In general, I liked the life stories of the members of the Mitford family much more than the book about them, the main advantage of this text is simply familiarizing readers with the fact that there were such Mitfords and that's how things turned out for them.
Maybe the fact is that the biography is designed for a reader who has already read "Life in a cold climate" about Nancy Mitford, or, in principle, has been familiar with the names of these women since childhood, but for those who stand at the starting point, like me, the composition of this work is not the most successful: I was preparing for separate chapters on heroines or for the chronicle structure of the text, but Laura Thompson literally throws everything out at once, while you haven't even compared the names and characteristics yet.
Then, of course, there will be a rollback, but still all the characters are always served in context, in the crowd, they are not brought to the fore, but as if they are only highlighted by a spotlight. But you have to compare not only them with what they do and say: firstly, all members of the family had nicknames and sometimes they are used instead of names, and okay Pam from Pamela, but Bobo from Unity and Deck from Jessica are not the most obvious options, agree.
Secondly, four of the six sisters wrote books, including about their family, and if Jessica, for example, although she loved to twist everything, but still claimed that her prose was documentary, then Nancy was primarily the author of novels, which means that she had characters in the surrounding reality, but changed them for the plot and gave the hero a new name, and it would be nice for us to know that David Mitford is Uncle so-and-so from such and such a novel.
To remember who meets whom in three layers, social, domestic and literary, turned out to be beyond my strength.
I willingly believe that a lot of work was done for "Imagine 6 Girls", I praise that Laura Thompson not only collected and somehow put together the material, but compared it with each other and comprehended it, trying not just to tell about the actions (many of which seemed to be some kind of whim, as if urine hit her head), but also to justify why the heroine acted one way or another.
It is noticeable that Thompson treats all the heroines with sympathy, but she never justifies them, and openly says that Nancy could have been kinder when she wrote letters to her sister who had just lost a child, Diana could not show off and admit the mistakes of her former hobbies when she was already asked about the Holocaust in the two thousandth, and Jessica did not reach out to her parents, eager for her forgiveness (and the question, were they ever guilty before her), just because I didn't want to admit I was wrong in the past.
The Mitford sisters appear, among other things, as a product of their environment, their upbringing and their era: whatever ideals they fought for, they were by no means alone in this, and even the obvious pariah Unity was actually only one of hundreds of English aristocrats who fawned over Adolf Hitler and asked Ribbentrop to meet him, and, in my opinion, only she alone eventually realized how wrong she was and punished herself to the fullest.
Of course, the Mitfords are not cut off from the rest of the world on the pages of the book, there are the royal family, and Churchill (his wife is a cousin of Sydney, the mother of a large family), and Guinness brewers, and the top of the Third Reich, and the Kennedy family, in general, "all the royal cavalry, all the royal army" a little, so "Imagine six girls" will be interesting not only to those who are interested in the fate of the Mitford sisters and brother, but also to lovers of all English, aristicratic or historical (by the way, Nancy Mitford's novels have been translated into Russian, and judging by the quotes given - these are very witty and clever things, so I will definitely read something).
From the amusing: every second, if not the first, English man from the upper class at the beginning of the 20th century had fun with pretty young men, regardless of whether he was married or single; receiving an inheritance, English aristocrats had to pay such a tax that they often simply did not pull it financially and sold almost everything they inherited; it is quite possible to be a relative of the Prime Minister of Great Britain and sit in prison for years when you are not even charged.
P.S. There is an idea in our country about horse-like Englishwomen and man-like Germans, the first of them is the photos of the Mitford sisters, who were amazingly beautiful even when they were old, can break in two counts.
423.253 SRY