SKIPPING CLASS

How a high-born rebel girl came to take up the cause of the commoner.

- BY RACHEL SYME

Growing up, I never had a sister, but I always wanted one—or many. Reading alone in my room, I imagined myself into tight-knit literary sororities: the Bennets, the Marches, the Dashwoods. These packs had their problems—petty squabbles, broken confidences, burnt hair—but I envied their intimacy and loyalty. It was the gang first, the world second. Beyond the precincts of fiction, of course, the world has a way of meddling with such bonds. There is perhaps no better example than the Mitford sisters, the six daughters of one of England’s most peculiar aristocratic families, whose radically divergent lives—two became fascists, one became a communist, one became a model aristocrat, one wrote novels skewering the bourgeoisie, and one retreated into cultivated solitude—have riveted the public for more than a century. I first learned about the family in college, when I encountered “Hons and Rebels,” a memoir by Jessica (Decca) Mitford, the second youngest of the group. Written in arch, inhalable prose, it begins as a story about the joy of having sisters and ends with the deep pain of losing them to irreconcilable differences. It was the first book that left me grateful to be my parents’ only daughter.

The Mitford sisters, born between 1904 and 1920, grew up in a cloistered environment that, had it not existed, would seem the stuff of fairy tales. Their father, David Freeman-Mitford, or Lord Redesdale, was a Conservative British peer who was an intermittently successful Army man before settling into his inherited land in the Cotswolds. His wife, Sydney Bowles, or Lady Redesdale, was the pampered daughter of the media baron Thomas Gibson Bowles, who, among other ventures, founded