Hons and Rebels

By Jessica Mitford
Introduction by Christopher Hitchens

Jessica Mitford, the great muckraking journalist, was part of a legendary English aristocratic family. Her sisters included Nancy, doyenne of the 1920s London smart set and a noted novelist and biographer; Diana, wife to the English fascist chief Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity, who fell head over in heels in love with Hitler; and Deborah, later the Duchess of Devonshire. Jessica swung left and moved to America, where she took part in the civil rights movement and wrote her classic exposé of the undertaking business, The American Way of Death.

Hons and Rebels is the hugely entertaining tale of Mitford's upbringing, which was, as she dryly remarks, “not exactly conventional. . . Debo spent silent hours in the chicken house learning to do an exact imitation of the look of pained concentration that comes over a hen's face when it is laying an egg. . . . Unity and I made up a complete language called Boudledidge, unintelligible to any but ourselves, in which we translated various dirty songs (for safe singing in front of the grown-ups).” But Mitford found her family's world as smothering as it was singular and, determined to escape it, she eloped with Esmond Romilly, Churchill's nephew, to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. The ensuing scandal, in which a British destroyer was dispatched to recover the two truants, inspires some of Mitford's funniest, and most pointed, pages.

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Reviews

Jessica tells her tale with girlish gush, brilliantly preserved a generation after the events...
— Time

Jessica Mitford (the fifth of the Mitford daughters) has brought a whole generation back to life in her autobiography....She tells the whole story of her rebellion...with engaging frankness and a spirited, often humorous, enthusiasm.
— Richard McLaughlin, Springfield Republican

The admitted 'rich vein of lunacy' in the Mitford family apparently has done nothing to dim the brilliance of its members among whom Jessica must be included. Although there's a strong undercurrent of seriousness throughout the book, it's submerged under downright hilariousness, crackling brash humor and enchanting turns-of-the-phrase.
— Millie Robbins, San Francisco Chronicle

It is impossible to read this objective, humorous and vividly evocative book without admiration for such a spirited achievement.
— Jeremy Brooks, New Statesman

...life among the Radlet-Mitfords...turns out to have been madder, more extreme, at times funnier, and often more tragic than Nancy's novel [The Pursuit of Love] showed it to be. Nature, far from copying art, has here exceeded it.
— Elizabeth Janeway, The New York Times

Stunning. Reads like extravagantly mannered fiction, except that it is all fabulously true...Miss Mitford is at once touching and wildly funny, and there is not one of her highly coloured characters that is not violently alive and uncomfortably kicking.
— Tatler

Wonderfully funny and very poignant.
— Philip Toynbee

More than an extremely amusing autobiography... she has evoked a whole generation. Her book is full of the music of time.
— Sunday Times

Also see:

Madame de Pompadour By Nancy Mitford Introduction by Amanda Foreman Nancy Mitford's delightfully candid biography re-creates the spirit of eighteenth-century Versailles with its love of pleasure and treachery.

Memoirs of Montparnasse By John Glassco Introduction by Louis Begley 1927. Finding college life "depressing...to a point where [he] could not go on" John "Buffy" Glassco decamped for Paris. Forty years later, he reconstructed this memoir à clef of his rollicking youth among the haute bohemians of the day, including Hemingway, Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Kay Boyle.

Fascinating Memoirs Collection Conundrum, The World I Live In, Renoir My Father, and Hons and Rebels

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