The Mitford Sisters: Scandal, Wit and Unwavering Eccentricity
Updated: Oct 4
On 6 October 1936, in the drawing room of Joseph Goebbels's house in Berlin, an English baron's daughter married the leader of Britain's fascists while Adolf Hitler looked on as guest of honour. A few months later her younger sister emptied her savings account, lied to her parents about a holiday and ran off to the Spanish Civil War with a teenage communist. A third sister was by then living in Munich and having lunch with Hitler. A fourth was writing comic novels about the lot of them. The fifth was happiest on a farm, and the sixth would end up running one of the grandest houses in England.
They were the Mitford sisters, and between them they managed to cover nearly every extreme the 20th century had to offer. The Times journalist Ben Macintyre summed them up in a line that's been repeated ever since: Diana the fascist, Jessica the communist, Unity the Hitler-lover, Nancy the novelist, Deborah the duchess and Pamela the “unobtrusive poultry connoisseur”.
Here's who they were, where they came from and what each of them did with the 20th century.
Quick Answers
Who were the Mitford sisters? The six daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. They also had one brother, Tom.
When were they born? Between 1904 (Nancy) and 1920 (Deborah).
Why are they famous? Nancy became a bestselling novelist, Diana married the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, Unity befriended Hitler, Jessica became a communist and campaigning journalist in America and Deborah became Duchess of Devonshire and rescued Chatsworth.
Which sisters were fascists? Diana and Unity. Their mother and, for a while, their father and brother Tom were sympathetic too.
Who was the last to die? Deborah, in September 2014, aged 94.
The Mitford Sisters in Order
There were seven Mitford children in all, six girls and a boy. In order of birth:
Nancy Mitford (1904-1973): the novelist, author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.
Pamela Mitford (1907-1994): known as Woman, the farmer and poultry expert who stayed out of the headlines.
Tom Mitford (1909-1945): the only brother, killed in Burma at the end of the Second World War.
Diana Mitford (1910-2003): the society beauty who married Oswald Mosley and spent three years in Holloway.
Unity Mitford (1914-1948): known as Bobo, the friend of Hitler who shot herself the day war was declared.
Jessica Mitford (1917-1996): known as Decca, the communist who eloped to Spain and became an American investigative journalist.
Deborah Mitford (1920-2014): known as Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire who saved Chatsworth.
Farve, Muv and a Childhood With No School
David Freeman-Mitford and Sydney Bowles married in February 1904. To their children they were Farve and Muv. Farve was a second son who'd been wounded three times in the Boer War and lost a lung, and who only became heir to the title when his elder brother was killed in the First World War. He inherited as Lord Redesdale in 1916. Before that he'd had a go at managing The Lady, the magazine founded by his father-in-law, and at gold prospecting on a claim in a small Canadian town called Swastika, Ontario. No gold ever turned up.
He was a man of fixed opinions and sudden rages. He claimed to have read only one book in his life, Jack London's White Fang, and to have enjoyed it so much he saw no reason to risk another. He's also said to have chased his children across the Oxfordshire countryside with a bloodhound for sport, a scene Nancy would later hand to the terrifying Uncle Matthew in her novels. Lit Hub's account of the family describes the children's freedom as something that would seem almost feral today, broken up by Farve's storms whenever someone broke one of his rules.
Muv was cooler and more remote, and just as eccentric. Slate's fact-check of the TV drama Outrageous describes her as an anti-vaxxer with Old Testament dietary rules, which in practice meant no pork, no shellfish and as few doctors as possible. She believed that what she called the Good Body would sort itself out if left alone.
Neither parent believed in sending girls to school. Tom went to Eton. His sisters got a succession of governesses and the run of their grandfather's library, which is how a family with almost no formal education produced several professional writers. Nancy, as Lit Hub puts it, never did learn to punctuate.
Money was tighter than the title suggested. The family sold the big house at Batsford in Gloucestershire, moved to Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire in 1919 and then, in 1926, to Swinbrook House, which Farve built himself and which most of his children loathed. Cut off from other children, they made their own world. Jessica and Unity invented a private language called Boudledidge. Jessica and Deborah had another, Honnish, and a secret society, the Hons, which met in a warm linen cupboard that Jessica remembered decades later as the one place with total privacy from the grown-ups.
The birth order matters, because the sisters effectively came in two batches. Nancy, Pamela, Tom and Diana were born between 1904 and 1910. Unity, Jessica and Deborah followed between 1914 and 1920. By the time the youngest were in the nursery, the eldest were already out in society, and the politics of the 1930s landed on each batch very differently.
Nancy Mitford: The Brilliant Observer
Nancy was born on 28 November 1904 and had three years as an only child before Pamela arrived, which she never quite forgave. She grew into the family's tormentor-in-chief, teasing her younger siblings so relentlessly that they formed a society against her and spelled it the Leag against Nancy. Looking back, she said the coldness started at the top. Of her mother she wrote, in a letter quoted by The New Criterion: “I was never hugged & kissed by her as a small child.”
In her twenties she escaped into the set that the newspapers called the Bright Young Things, a crowd of Oxford aesthetes, party-givers and writers that included Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron and Harold Acton. She spent a short time at the Slade School of Fine Art, wrote for Vogue and The Lady to top up a thin allowance and published her first novel, Highland Fling, in 1931.
Her love life was a mess. From 1928 she considered herself engaged to Hamish St Clair-Erskine, who was gay, drank heavily and had no intention of marrying her. When he finally ended it in 1933 she accepted, almost at once, a proposal from Peter Rodd, a clever, idle know-all she nicknamed Prod. They married that December. He was unfaithful and couldn't hold down a job, and although the marriage dragged on in name until the late 1950s it was over long before that.
Politics split her from her sisters in 1935, when she published Wigs on the Green, a comic novel that sent up Mosley's Blackshirts and featured a towering, fanatical young heiress who was obviously Unity. Diana and Unity were furious. Nancy's own views hardened in 1939 when she went to Perpignan to help refugees pouring over the border from the Spanish Civil War and came home a committed anti-fascist and a socialist of sorts.
Then came the act that still startles people. In 1940, with Mosley already arrested, Nancy was asked by the authorities for her view of Diana. She told them to look at her sister's passport and count the trips to Germany, and added, as Jezebel's account of the betrayal records: “I regard her as an extremely dangerous person.” Diana was arrested soon afterwards. She didn't find out what Nancy had done until after Nancy's death.
Nancy spent the war in London, driving an ambulance, working in a canteen and, from March 1942, selling books at Heywood Hill in Curzon Street, Mayfair, where an English Heritage blue plaque now marks her time. She soon ran the shop, and it became a meeting place for half of literary London. A brief wartime affair left her with an ectopic pregnancy and unable to have children.
In 1942 she met Gaston Palewski, a Free French colonel and one of General de Gaulle's closest aides. She fell for him completely. He was charmed, entertained and never in love with her, and she more or less accepted that being appreciated was the next best thing. He's the model for the dashing Frenchman in The Pursuit of Love, which she published in December 1945 and which sold around 200,000 copies in its first year. Uncle Matthew was Farve. The Radlett children in the Hons' cupboard were her sisters. Love in a Cold Climate followed in 1949 and did even better.
With the money she moved to Paris in April 1946 to be near the Colonel and never lived in England again. She wrote well-received lives of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XIV and Frederick the Great, and in 1955 caused a national outbreak of anxiety with an essay on “U and non-U” speech, which told the British that saying “serviette” instead of “napkin” gave their class away. She meant it as a tease. People took it as law.
Palewski eventually married someone else. Nancy moved to Versailles in 1967, fell ill soon afterwards with what turned out to be Hodgkin's disease and spent her last years in severe pain, still writing funny letters. France gave her the Legion d'honneur and Britain a CBE in 1972. She died on 30 June 1973 and is buried at Swinbrook. On her deathbed she's said to have wished for just one more day's hunting.
Pamela Mitford: The Poultry Connoisseur
Pamela, born on 25 November 1907, is the sister who gets a single line in most accounts, usually the one about chickens. She had polio as a small child, which left her slower and less quick-tongued than the others in a household where speed of wit was everything, and Nancy made her a favourite target. When Pamela filled out in her early teens, Nancy named her Woman. The name stuck for the rest of her life.
She was the countrywoman of the family: a fine horsewoman and gardener and, as one profile of the forgotten sister notes, probably the only Mitford who could really cook. She was also far from unnoticed at the time. She was engaged in 1928 to Oliver Watney of the brewing family, an engagement that was called off the following year. John Betjeman fell in love with her, proposed twice and wrote a verse about the sisters that ends with Miss Pamela, “most rural of them all”. In about 1925 the French society painter Paul César Helleu drew her portrait in Paris.
While Diana was married to Bryan Guinness, Pamela ran the dairy farm on their estate at Biddesden in Wiltshire from 1930 to 1934, which was a real job and an unusual one for a peer's daughter. In 1936 she married Derek Jackson, a millionaire physicist and amateur jockey who would marry six times in all. Jackson shared some of the family's pro-German leanings before the war, though he went on to serve with distinction in the RAF. When Nancy informed on Diana, she had things to say about Pamela and Derek too. Nothing came of it.
It was Pamela who picked up the pieces in 1940. When Diana was taken to Holloway, the two youngest Mosley boys, one of them a baby, went to live with the Jacksons. She had no children of her own.
After the war the Jacksons settled at Tullamaine Castle near Fethard in County Tipperary. The marriage ended in 1951. When Pamela left Ireland for Switzerland she gave the Helleu portrait to the local Church of Ireland rector as a goodbye present, and The Irish Times reported it coming up for auction in Dublin decades later with an estimate of €20,000 to €30,000.
She spent roughly the next twenty years with Giuditta Tommasi, an Italian horsewoman, before returning in 1972 to the Cotswolds, where she lived at Caudle Green in Gloucestershire. She's widely credited with bringing the Appenzeller Spitzhauben, a Swiss chicken with a forward-pointing crest, to Britain. In her seventies she was still cooking three-course dinners for guests. She died in London on 12 April 1994, aged 86, and was buried at Swinbrook with her sisters.
Diana Mitford (Lady Mosley): The Fascist Femme Fatale
Diana, born on 17 June 1910, was the acknowledged beauty of the family and one of the great beauties of her generation. At 18 she got engaged to Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, and married him in 1929. They had two sons, houses in London, Dublin and Wiltshire, and a place at the centre of fashionable society. Evelyn Waugh dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to them.
In February 1932 she met Sir Oswald Mosley. He was 35, married, a former Labour minister and about to launch the British Union of Fascists. Diana left her husband for him, set herself up in a house nearby as his mistress and was divorced by 1933, the same year Mosley's wife Cynthia died. Her parents were appalled, less by the politics than by what they saw as living in sin.
Mosley's movement needed money and friends, and Diana went looking for both in Germany. She first visited with Unity, attended the Nuremberg rallies and met Hitler in 1935. She became friendly with Magda Goebbels, and it was in the Goebbelses' Berlin home that she and Mosley were married in secret on 6 October 1936, with Hitler present. The date is worth a second look. Two days earlier, tens of thousands of Londoners had stopped Mosley's Blackshirts from marching through the East End at the Battle of Cable Street. He went more or less straight from that humiliation to his wedding. Magda, the hostess, would kill her six children in Hitler's bunker nine years later.
The marriage stayed secret until the birth of their first son, Alexander, in 1938. A second, Max, followed in April 1940. By then Mosley had already had his own share of hostile receptions, including the afternoon in 1937 when a stone knocked him out in Liverpool before he could open his mouth. In May 1940 he was interned under Defence Regulation 18B, which allowed detention without trial.
Diana followed on 29 June 1940. She was breastfeeding Max, who was eleven weeks old, and was told to leave him behind. An account of her time in Holloway describes a filthy cell with a sandbagged window and a mattress on the floor, and quotes MI5's verdict on her: “a sinister and extremely dangerous young woman”. In her own memoir she wrote about the particular horror of a cell door with no handle on the inside.
She had a cousin by marriage in Downing Street, though. Clementine Churchill was a relation of the Mitfords, and it was reportedly Winston Churchill's intervention that allowed Mosley to be moved into Holloway to join his wife. The couple lived in a small house within the prison walls, grew vegetables and had other prisoners to clean for them. They were released in November 1943 and kept under house arrest for the rest of the war. Jessica wrote from America demanding they be put back inside.
They never apologised. Refused passports until 1949, the Mosleys eventually settled in France at the Temple de la Gloire, a small neoclassical house at Orsay outside Paris, where their neighbours and close friends were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Diana reviewed books, wrote well and published a memoir, A Life of Contrasts, in 1977. Mosley died in 1980.
In November 1989 she appeared on Desert Island Discs and told Sue Lawley she didn't believe six million Jews had been murdered, calling the figure not conceivable. The broadcast still draws complaints, and Lawley's response at the time was blunt: “It's almost as if you're rewriting history.” Diana remained fond of Hitler's memory to the end and seemed unbothered by what anyone thought of that. “Being hated means nothing to me,” she said, as TIME noted. She died in Paris on 11 August 2003, aged 93, during that summer's heatwave.
Unity Valkyrie Mitford: Hitler's Superfan
Unity Valkyrie Mitford was born on 8 August 1914, four days after Britain went to war with Germany. The middle name was her grandfather's idea, borrowed from Wagner. Family legend, cheerfully repeated by the sisters, held that she'd been conceived in Swastika, Ontario, during one of Farve's prospecting trips. You couldn't make it up, and for once nobody had to.
She grew to nearly six foot one and liked to shock. The Spectator's centenary profile has her turning up to debutante dances with a pet rat called Ratular and a grass snake called Enid, and being asked to leave more than one boarding school. Through Diana she met Mosley and joined his movement, and in 1933 she went to the Nuremberg rally as part of a British fascist delegation. One look at Hitler was enough. She decided she had to meet him.
In 1934 she moved to Munich, learned German and found out where he ate. For months she sat in the Osteria Bavaria, his favourite restaurant, at a table where he couldn't miss her. On 9 February 1935 he sent someone over to invite her to join him. She called it “the most wonderful and beautiful day of my life”.
Over the next four and a half years she met him, by her own careful diary count, 140 times. He was taken with her name, her looks and her connections, and seems to have thought of her as a useful line to the English upper class. Eva Braun was less charmed and wrote in her diary: “She is known as the Valkyrie and looks the part, including her legs.” There's no evidence that Unity and Hitler were lovers.
What there is plenty of evidence for is her antisemitism, which was loud and proud. In 1935 she wrote to Julius Streicher's paper Der Stürmer asking that her full name be printed because she wanted everyone to know she was a Jew-hater. She spoke to a crowd of 200,000 at a midsummer rally at the Hesselberg. She was given a gold party badge, a box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and later a flat in Munich taken from a Jewish couple, whom she reportedly visited to discuss the curtains while they wept. Britain's own radio traitor, Lord Haw-Haw, went to Germany to broadcast. Unity went because she adored the place.
She'd told Diana that if the two countries she loved went to war, she'd kill herself. On 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war, she walked into the Englischer Garten in Munich and shot herself in the head with a small pistol, said to have been a gift from Hitler. She survived. The bullet lodged in her brain and couldn't be removed.
She lay unconscious in a Munich clinic for weeks in a room full of flowers from the Nazi leadership. Hitler paid the bills, visited her and arranged for her to be moved to neutral Switzerland. In January 1940 Muv and Deborah went to collect her and brought her home through Folkestone, to a storm of press attention and questions in Parliament about why she wasn't being interned.
The answer was obvious to anyone who saw her. She'd learned to walk again but was childlike, incontinent and vague, with the mental age of a young girl. Muv looked after her for the rest of her life, at Swinbrook and on Inch Kenneth, the Hebridean island the family owned. Rumours that she'd come home pregnant and secretly given birth to Hitler's child in an Oxfordshire maternity home surfaced decades later and have never been backed by evidence.
In May 1948 the bullet shifted and she developed meningitis. She died in hospital at Oban on 28 May, aged 33. Jessica, who hated everything Unity stood for, never stopped loving her and never stopped wondering how the sister she'd shared a bedroom with had turned her back on humanity.
Jessica ‘Decca’ Mitford: The Communist Crusader
Jessica, always Decca, was born on 11 September 1917 and decided early that she wanted out. As a child she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank, which replied with perfect solemnity. She shared a room with Unity, and when Unity scratched swastikas into the window with a diamond ring, Decca answered with hammers and sickles. The scratches were still there when she went back decades later.
Her way out arrived in January 1937 in the shape of Esmond Romilly, a second cousin and a nephew of Clementine Churchill. He was 18, had run away from Wellington College to start a left-wing schoolboy newspaper, and had just come back from fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Decca had been in love with the idea of him for years. Within days of meeting they had a plan. She invented an invitation to stay with friends on the Continent, took the roughly £50 from her running-away fund and left England with him on 8 February.
They got to Bilbao, where Esmond had work as a reporter. Back home the family pulled every string it had. Decca was made a ward of court, the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden became involved and a Royal Navy destroyer was roped into the effort to fetch her. She refused to go home. Nancy was dispatched to talk sense into her and failed. On 18 May 1937 the pair were married in Bayonne, with both mothers in attendance. The papers called it the wedding even a destroyer couldn't stop.
They set up home in Rotherhithe in south-east London, among the dockers, and Esmond worked for a time as a croupier. Their daughter Julia was born that December and died in a measles outbreak five months later. In 1939 they emigrated to America, where they sold stockings, tended bar in Miami and lived on their wits. When war came Esmond joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. On 30 November 1941 his plane failed to return from a raid on Hamburg. Decca, 24, was left in Washington with their baby daughter Constancia.
She stayed. In 1943 she married Robert Treuhaft, a left-wing lawyer and the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, and moved to Oakland in California. They joined the Communist Party, worked for the Civil Rights Congress and campaigned, without success, to save Willie McGee, a black man executed in Mississippi in 1951 after a deeply flawed rape trial. In 1953 they were hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer. Their son Nicholas was killed by a bus in 1955, aged ten. They left the party in 1958, by which point, as The Oldie recalls, Decca thought it had “got rather drab and useless”.
Then she started writing. Hons and Rebels, her 1960 memoir of the Mitford nursery and the elopement, did as much as Nancy's novels to turn the family into a legend. Three years later came The American Way of Death, a very funny and very angry investigation of the funeral trade and how it squeezed grieving families with pricey caskets and needless embalming. The idea came from Treuhaft, who'd noticed how union death benefits always seemed to match the undertaker's bill exactly. The first printing of 20,000 copies sold out on publication day, federal investigations into the industry began the following year and the eventual result was the Funeral Rule, which forces American funeral homes to give customers itemised prices. When Robert Kennedy had to choose a coffin for his brother in 1963, he's said to have had her book in mind and picked the cheaper one.
She went on to take apart the prison system, the trial of Dr Spock and a correspondence course called the Famous Writers School, which didn't survive the experience. She also fronted a band called Decca and the Dectones, with herself on vocals and kazoo. She and Diana never made peace. Apart from a brief meeting at Nancy's deathbed, they didn't speak after the 1930s.
Decca died of lung cancer on 23 July 1996, aged 78. True to form, she'd arranged the cheapest send-off going: a cremation with no casket and no ceremony for $475, plus $58.31 in fees. Her ashes were scattered at sea.
Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire: The Sensible Duchess
Deborah, born on 31 March 1920, was the last of the seven and yet another girl, which was a disappointment to her parents at the time. Nancy called her Nine, on the grounds that this was her mental age, and told her she'd never marry because of a gland in her neck that bubbled in the night. Debo called her memoir Wait for Me!, which is what she spent her childhood shouting at the backs of taller sisters.
She was the one who loved Swinbrook, got on with Farve and cared about hens, horses and skating a great deal more than politics. In 1937 Muv took her to Munich to visit Unity, and so, at 17, she found herself having tea with Hitler while Unity did the talking in German. It left no mark. Asked years later whether she'd have preferred tea with Hitler or with Elvis Presley, she thought the question absurd. It was Elvis, obviously. In old age she had Elvis slippers, a collection of memorabilia and a visit to Graceland behind her, which makes her one of the least likely fans the King ever had.
In April 1941 she married Lord Andrew Cavendish, a Coldstream Guards officer and the second son of the Duke of Devonshire, in a London church days after an air raid had damaged her parents' house. He wasn't supposed to inherit. His elder brother Billy had married Kathleen Kennedy, sister of the future president, in May 1944, and was killed in action in Belgium four months later. That made Andrew the heir and tied Debo to the Kennedys for life. She went to John F Kennedy's inauguration and to his funeral, and when fog shut Heathrow on the way back she put up the Prime Minister and the rest of the official party at Chatsworth for the night.
Andrew's father died suddenly in 1950, leaving death duties of 80 per cent on an estate valued at around £7 million. It took the best part of two decades to pay. Land went, pictures went and Hardwick Hall was handed to the National Trust in place of tax. Plenty of people assumed Chatsworth itself would follow. Instead the family moved back into the house in 1959 and Debo set about making it pay.
She turned out to be very good at it. She redecorated the house room by room, replanted the gardens, opened a farmyard for children and in 1977 started a farm shop selling the estate's own produce, years before every stately home had one. She could sometimes be found in the ticket office herself. Her Scotsman obituary notes that the 600 people who worked there knew exactly who to complain to. Chatsworth went from a liability to one of the most visited houses in the country, and other owners came to her for advice.
It wasn't all easy. She and Andrew lost three babies shortly after birth, he drank heavily for much of the marriage before giving up for his last twenty years, and he was unfaithful. She stayed. She sat for Lucian Freud several times and said of the portraits that she'd grown to look like them: “Even the one with a green moustache.” She took up writing at 60 and produced a shelf of books. She once brought a goat home from a Scottish island by boat, train and taxi, and one biographical sketch has her using live chicks instead of flowers as a table centrepiece.
Alone among the sisters she stayed on speaking terms with all the others, fascist and communist alike. She described herself as a Conservative mainly, she said, because she liked “conserving things”. Widowed in 2004, she moved to a house in the estate village of Edensor and died on 24 September 2014, aged 94. Elvis was played at the funeral, and the Chatsworth staff lined the route.
The Mitford Sisters: A Legacy of Madness and Marvel
It's tempting to treat the Mitfords as a parlour game, the posh family that produced one of everything. The jokes, nicknames and private languages make that easy. But the choices were real and so was the damage. Unity cheered on a regime that murdered millions and then put a bullet in her own head. Diana went to her grave defending it. Nancy informed on one sister, Jessica campaigned to keep her locked up, and Diana and Jessica didn't exchange a friendly word in sixty years.
Tom, the only brother, shared some of Diana's sympathies, refused to fight against Germany and was sent to Burma instead, where he died of wounds in 1945 aged 36. Farve never got over it. He and Muv, who had ended up on opposite sides over Hitler, separated during the war. He died in 1958 and she in 1963.
What's left is an extraordinary paper trail. The sisters wrote to each other constantly for the best part of eighty years, and between the letters, Nancy's novels, Decca's memoirs and Debo's books they left one of the best-documented family rows in history. The fact that it's still being adapted for television, most recently as the 2025 drama Outrageous, suggests nobody's finished arguing about them yet.
FAQ
Were the Mitford sisters related to Winston Churchill?
By marriage, yes. Churchill's wife Clementine was a cousin of the sisters' father, and Jessica's first husband Esmond Romilly was Clementine's nephew. Findmypast's dig through the records notes the old rumour that the sisters' grandfather was Clementine's real father, which would make the link closer still.
Where are the Mitford sisters buried?
Nancy, Unity, Pamela and Diana are all buried in the churchyard of St Mary's at Swinbrook in Oxfordshire, a short walk from where they grew up. Deborah is buried at Edensor on the Chatsworth estate. Jessica's ashes were scattered at sea off California.
Did all the sisters meet Hitler?
No. Unity and Diana knew him well, and Deborah and Pamela each met him once or twice in the 1930s, as did their parents. Nancy and Jessica never did. Jessica wrote that as a teenager she used to daydream about getting close enough to shoot him.
Which Mitford sister inspired a Harry Potter name?
J.K. Rowling has called Jessica Mitford her heroine since she read Hons and Rebels at 14, and named her eldest daughter Jessica after her.
You Might Also Like
Sources
History Hit: Bright Young People, the 6 Extraordinary Mitford Sisters
Lit Hub: Fascist, Communist, Writer, Duchess, the Legend of the Mitford Sisters
Findmypast: The Real Story Behind the Mitford Sisters TV Show Outrageous
The New Criterion: A Talent to Delight, Nancy Mitford in Her Letters
Islington Guided Walks: Holloway Prison in WW2, Diana Mosley
Campaign Against Antisemitism: Lady Mosley's Desert Island Discs Interview
History on the Net: Unity Mitford, Socialite, Fascist and Hitler's Lover?
The Oldie: Jessica Mitford, 30 Years Since Her American (Way of) Death
Forest Hill Cemetery Guide: Muckraking and Consumer Protection, the Legacy of Jessica Mitford
Mostly British History: The Youngest Mitford, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire
