Charlotte Mosley - The Mitfords - Letters between Six Sisters

Married, in 1941, Lord Andrew Cavendish, who succeeded his father as 11th Duke of Devonshire in 1950. One son, Peregrine, two daughters, Emma and Sophia. Immunized by her sisters’ fanatical views, she remained firmly apolitical all her life. An astute and capable businesswoman, she was largely responsible for putting Chatsworth, the Devonshire family home, on to a sound footing after she and her husband moved back into the house in 1959. Accused by Nancy of illiteracy, she was suspected by her family and friends of being a secret reader. Diana believed that unlike most people who pretend to have read books that they have not, Deborah pretended not to have read books that she had. She took to writing late in life and produced The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth (1982), The Estate, A View of Chatsworth (1990), Farm Animals (1991), Treasures of Chatsworth (1991), The Garden at Chatsworth (1999), Counting My Chickens (2001), The Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth Cookery Book (2003) and Round About Chatsworth (2005).

The correspondence between the six Mitford sisters consists of some twelve thousand letters – over four million words – of which little more than five per cent has been included in this volume. Out of the fifteen possible patterns of exchange between the sisters, there are only three gaps: no letters between Unity and Pamela have survived, and there are none from Unity to Deborah. The proportion of existing letters from each sister varies greatly: political differences led Jessica to destroy all but one of Diana’s letters to her, while the exchange between Deborah and Diana, the two longest-lived sisters, runs to some three thousand on each side.

The Mitfords had a brother, Tom, who was sent away to school aged eight while his sisters were taught at home. Although he composed many dutiful letters to his parents, Tom rarely wrote to the rest of the family. Unlike his sisters, for whom writing was as natural as speaking, he took no pleasure in the art of corresponding. (In 1937, in a brief note added to the bottom of one of Unity’s letters to Jessica, he deplored his ‘constitutional hatred’ for letter-writing.) Perhaps his later training as a barrister also made him wary of committing his thoughts to paper. Nancy often wrote to Tom before she married and although over a hundred of her letters to him have been preserved, as have a handful from his other sisters, the correspondence is so one-sided that no letters to or from Tom have been included in this volume.

Letters make a fragmentary biography at best and I have not attempted to present a comprehensive picture of the Mitfords’ lives; those seeking a more complete account can turn to the plentiful books by and about the family. In order to weave a coherent narrative out of the vast archive and link the six voices, I have focused my choice of letters on the relationship between the sisters. I have also selected striking, interesting or entertaining passages, as well as those that are particularly relevant to the story of their lives. While some letters have been included in their entirety, more often I have deliberately cut them, sometimes removing just a sentence, at other times paring them down to a single paragraph. To indicate all these cuts would be too distracting and they have therefore been made silently.

As in many families, the Mitfords used a plethora of nicknames and often several different ones for the same person. While the origins of most of these are long forgotten, the roots of a few can be traced. Sir Oswald Mosley, Diana’s husband of forty-four years, who was known as ‘Tom’ or ‘the Leader’ before the war and ‘Sir O’, ‘Sir Oz’ or ‘Sir Ogre’ after the war, was nearly always called ‘Kit’ by Diana. In private she admitted that the name came from ‘kitten’ but, realizing its inappropriateness for such a powerful character, she wrote in her memoirs that she could not remember how it had originated. Deborah knew him as ‘Cyril’ because as a young girl she had asked her mother how she should address her new brother-in-law and misheard her terse answer, ‘He’S Sir Oswald to me’. Nancy often referred to Mosley as ‘Keats’, a derivation of ‘Kit’. Deborah’S husband, Andrew Devonshire, was known as ‘Ivan’ (the Terrible) or ‘Peter’ (the Great), according to his mood. He was also called ‘Claud’ because when his title was Lord Harrington, before he inherited the dukedom, he used to receive letters addressed to ‘Claud Hartington Esq.’ To make matters even more complicated, Nancy and Jessica addressed and signed letters to each other as ‘Susan’ or ‘Soo’, for reasons now forgotten; Deborah and Jessica called each other ‘Hen’, and by extension ‘Henderson’, inspired by their passion for chickens; Jessica and Unity were to each other ‘Boud’, from a private language they invented as children called ‘Boudledidge’. Nancy addressed Deborah as ‘9’, the mental age beyond which she claimed her youngest sister had never progressed.