Laura Thompson’s engaging group biography of the six Mitford sisters – Nancy, Diana, Jessica, Pamela, Unity and Deborah – pays particular attention to their early years. The cocoon of their wealth and privilege, the intimacies and rivalries of childhood, the nicknames and nursery language shaped their adult lives. They never shook it off. Competition was part of the complex bond between them and their politics – Diana’s marriage to Oswald Mosley, Jessica’s communism, Unity’s puppyish adoration of Hitler – was a part of their “lifelong game of sister whist”. There was a sense that they were testing one another in their extremism, and there’s an appalling irony to the fact that Unity, following her botched suicide attempt, would remain forever fixed in a child-state. Thompson’s is an astute, highly readable and well assembled book, and she writes with particular intelligence about the sisters’ self-mythologising, the phenomenon of them, and their ongoing hold on the public imagination, even now.
Take Six Girls is published by Head of Zeus (£25). Click here to order it for £20
