<p>The eldest was a razor-sharp novelist of upper-class manners; the second was loved by John Betjeman; the third was a fascist who married Oswald Mosley; the fourth idolized Hitler and shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany; the fifth was a member of the American Communist Party; the sixth became Duchess of Devonshire.</p><p>They were the Mitford sisters: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Born into country-house privilege in the early years of the 20th century, they became prominent as "bright young things" in the high society of interwar London. Then, as the shadows crept over 1930s Europe, the stark -- and very public -- differences in their outlooks came to symbolize the political polarities of a dangerous decade.</p><p>The intertwined stories of their stylish and scandalous lives -- recounted in masterly fashion by Laura Thompson -- hold up a revelatory mirror to upper-class English life before and after WWII. <i>The Six</i> was previously published as <i>Take Six Girls. </i></p>
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Siblings In Love And War
The six daughters of the 2nd Lord Redesdale were born between 1904 and 1920, and their lives whether short or long have come to emulate much of the twentieth century's brightest and darkest periods. Laura Thompson's joint biography of the sisters focuses on their lives as part of one family that was sometimes loving, often in conflict, and always eccentric. The timeframe runs roughly from the marriage of their parents (but including some necessary preliminary background) to the death of their widowed mother in 1963, with an Afterwards summarizing the sisters' later years. The Mitford Girls in order of birth were Nancy, a highly successful novelist and historian; Pamela, who quietly suffered the aftereffects of polio and possibly some learning disabilities, leading a quiet rural life for the most part; glamorous Diana, who made a glittering Society wedding at 18 and then left her husband for Sir Oswald Mosley and Fascism; Unity, so enamored of Hitler and Nazism that she became notorious in her early twenties, then died from the after effects of a botched suicide attempt in 1948; Jessica the Communist, a rebel who abandoned her parents and sisters and eventually became a notable muckraking journalist in the United States; and Deborah, who married a man who became Duke of Devonshire, making her the chatelaine of one of the grandest private houses in England. The six girls, along with their beloved only brother Tom (who was killed at the end of World War II) had an aristocratic but eccentric upbringing. Their father inherited a sizeable estate but lost nearly all of it to bad management and bad luck, while their mother was notably detached from her husband and children even by Edwardian standards. Uneducated except for governesses and some short periods in private schools here and there, they fed their sharp minds in an excellent family library and picked up more knowledge through travel and from their large circle of friends. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s the Mit...
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