Jessica Mitford

Jessica Mitford

Jessica Mitford (1917–1996) was the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, and she and her five sisters and one brother grew up in isolation on their parents' Cotswold estate. Rebelling against her family's hidebound conservatism, Mitford became an outspoken socialist and, with her second cousin and husband-to-be Esmond Romilly, ran away to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Romilly was killed in World War II, and Mitford moved to America, where she married the lawyer and political activist Robert Treuhaft. A brilliant muckraking journalist, Jessica Mitford was the author of, among many other books, a study of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, and Kind and Unusual Punishment: The Prison Business. She died at the age of seventy-eight while working on a follow-up to The American Way of Death, for which, with characteristic humor, she proposed the title "Death Warmed Over."

From the Review

March 8, 1979: Foiled (letter)

March 9, 1972: Prisons: The Menace of Liberal Reform

Struggle for Justice: A Report on Crime and Punishment in America prepared for the American Friends Service Committee

Maximum Security: Letters from California's Prisons edited by Eve Pell. and members of the Prison Law Project

May 9, 1968: Violence in Oakland (letter)

From New York Review Books

Hons and Rebels In Hons and Rebels Jessica Mitford tells about her upbringing, which, she drily remarks, "even for England, in those far-off days of the middle twenties...was not exactly conventional....