The last of the Mitford Sisters died in 2014. Deborah Cavendish, known to the world as Debo the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, was a well liked English eccentric of the sort the aristocracy can be relied on to produce. She famously decided at a young age that she would marry a Duke, and sang to herself a version of “The Man I’d Like to Marry”, with the word “Man” replaced with “Duke”. However, all her eccentricities were not what set her apart from the rest of her sisters. The reason for that is her dogged refusal to leave England, or even Devonshire. Not so the other Mitfords, whose transnational lives are a worthy subject of conversation, as examples of the many and varied paths of the lower rungs of the aristocracy in the 20th century.
First to be discussed should be the Mitford who did the most to establish and maintain the families name in the public eye. Nancy Mitford was a novelist and socialite most famous for two semi-autobiographical works, The Pursuit of Love, and Love in a Cold Climate. These novels were heavily based on her life and the lives of her sisters, with Jessica Mitford being one of the models for the protagonist of The Pursuit of Love, for instance. Nancy is an example of the transnational socialite class. One of the “Bright Young People” of inter-war Europe, she was a frequent international traveller. Eventually falling in love with a former Free French resistance fighter (while married to another man) she settled down in Paris as so many writers of the time did. She is in this way a model of the transnational bohemian.
Next, Jessica Mitford should not go without discussion. Like Nancy she had left wing politics, however Jessica’s were far more extreme. Along with her husband, Jessica went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War, alongside many from the worldwide communist movement. It is hard to think of a more transnational armed body than the International Brigades. After the end of the civil war Jessica returned to England, where she engaged in the battle with the Blackshirts, before travelling to America. There, like many communists, she became highly involved in the struggle for civil rights, which led to her being called in front of HUAC. However she like many others left the communist party in ’58, after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. It is also in America where Jessica wrote her most well-known book, The American Way of Death, an expose on the abuses of the funeral industry.
Finally, we come to the most sordid of the Mitfords, Unity and Diana, the fascists. Diana married Sir Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, in 1936. The wedding took place in the house of Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s Propaganda Minister. For her involvement with international fascism she was interned for three years during World War Two, along with her husband. She remained with him for his entire life and was an unrepentant fascist to the end. This did not stop her being a member of high society, or from contributing to several high-profile papers including the Independent. However, her fascism, while a part of the international current, was a largely English phenomenon. It is her sister, Unity, who truly embodied the transnational nature of inter-war fascism. A convert to the cause, just like her sister, Unity travelled to Germany in 1934 due to her obsession with Adolf Hitler. Her familial connections with Hitler’s beloved Wagner granted her access to his inner circle of friends. When Hitler announced the Anschluss with Austria, it was Unity who stood next to him on the balcony. She was a passionate supporter of an Anglo-German alliance against Judaism, and frequently pleaded with Hitler to this effect. When Britain declared war on Germany, she was so distraught that she shot herself in the head in the English Garden in Munich. While she lived for several years after, she never recovered mentally, and died in 1948.
It is clear that these four women, the bohemian, the communist, and the fascists, represent different strands of development for the lower-ranks of the aristocracy following the first world war. With the old world dying, they had to find places in the new one. Clearly this turned out better for some than for others, but it is clear that all four embarked on clearly transnational paths.