The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family
This group biography is what Outrageous is based on, and for very good reason. It offers a deep, informative dive on the Mitford family—the six sisters, yes, but also their parents and various relations including spouses and children—and manages to share their sometimes-unbelievable story and at the same time correct mistakes that past historians have made. If you haven’t yet read about the family, this is a marvelous place to begin.
Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford; The Biography
Laura Thompson, whose The Six chronicles the lives of all of the Mitford sisters, goes all in on Nancy here. Thanks to unprecedented to Nancy’s private correspondence as well as interviews with her living sisters and an expert reading of her fiction and journalism, Thompson gives us a full and fleshed-out picture of the most famous Mitford beyond what we’ve ever known—capturing not only her legendary wit, but her whole being.
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Diana Mosley: Mitford Beauty, British Fascist, Hitler’s Angel
Diana Miford is not one of the sisters whose legacy is uncomplicated. She secured an impressive social position with her marriage to beer scion Bryan Guinness, but upended it all when she left him for the (then still married) fascist politician Oswald Mosley. The two cast a dark shadow over their era—thanks in no small part to his admiration for Mussolini and her friendship with Hitler—and became national punching bags, eventually both finding themselves imprisoned. here, Anne de Courcy explores how Diana went from a dazzling debutante to a political outcast, with no small amount of help from Diana herself—and the assurance that the book wouldn’t appear until after her death.
Unity Mitford : A Quest
Unity might have been the most scandalous of the Mitford sisters—it’s no wonder, considering her early embrace of right-wing politics and her eventual move to Germany to be close (though just how close no one really knows) to Hitler. When the UK and Germany went to war, she shot herself, but that doesn’t mean her life story was cut short. Here, David Pryce-Jones investigates how and why a young woman in Unity’s position ended up the way she did; the book was considered so troubling upon release that her family, even those who had cooperated with him, went wild doing damage control. Doesn’t that just make everyone want to read it more?
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Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me
Keen to learn more about the Mitfords without reading all of those biographies? Mimi Pond gives the sisters the graphic novel treatment in this charming, informative look at who they were and why so many of us still care; it’s easily as packed with information as any of the other books on this list, but has the added charm and benefit of Pond’s illustrations.
Nancy Mitford: A Portrait
Nancy’s longtime friend Harold Acton—who himself is said to have inspired a character in Brideshead Revisited—makes use of her own correspondence and notes for a planned (but never completed) memoir to tell her story. It’s perhaps less warts-and-all than other books, but does a marvelous job of getting inside of Nancy’s world, and as the New York Times said in a review around its publication, the book is “gossipy and cheerful, without any of the self‐consciousness of a diary or personal autobiography or the dishonesty of so much official biography.”
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The Mitford Affair
While most of what’s been written about the Mitfords has been non-fiction, here author Marie Benedict takes their dire pre-WWII predicament and turns it into the basis for a novel about high society, family ties, and the fate of Europe. Is every word true? Decidedly not, but it’s a delicious page turner that leaves readers with a good sense of the family’s actual history—even if some of the details are exaggerated, as they so often were also by the Mitfords themselves.
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