When Deborah Cavendish,​ duchess of Devonshire, died at the age of 94 in September 2014, the obituary headlines rang the changes on ‘the end of an era’ and ‘the last of the Mitford sisters’. If the first was true, the second was not. It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords. What Jessica, one of Deborah Devonshire’s older siblings, called ‘the Mitford Industry’ has powered on in spite of the absence of its principals (and in some cases because of it), refuelled by access to new material and a reduced fear of libel. Of the seven children of David and Sydney, Lord and Lady Redesdale, six were girls; the Mitford industry revolves, lighthouse-like, between them. Nancy, the novelist, wit and Bright Young Thing, comes to prominence whenever her books are dramatised; Unity and Diana, the Nazis, are subjects for studies of British upper-class fascism; Debo, as she was always known, the châtelaine of Chatsworth, attracts the interest of architectural historians and fans of the aristocracy; Jessica, known as Decca, is the communist. Pamela, once satirised in Private Eye as ‘Doreen: the unknown Mitford sister’, was the only one never to make international news, her lesbianism causing no more than a local disturbance. They were all monsters, sacred monsters at times, but monstrous nonetheless in the sheer scale of their lives and characters and in the self-belief that propelled what might have been, in smaller personalities, merely enthusiasms or inclinations onto the world stage. Lady Redesdale said that whenever she saw a headline beginning ‘Peer’s Daughter …’ she knew it would be one of hers. They started the industry themselves. Nancy’s novel The Pursuit of Love (1945) gave a witty account of family life which was less exaggerated than most readers must have imagined, and Decca’s memoir Hons and Rebels (1960) was an instant bestseller. The Times found it ‘extremely funny’; her sisters, without exception, hated it. The growing numbers of Mitfordists took sides.

Carla Kaplan’s Troublemaker is the first scholarly biography of Jessica, and it is both opportune and persuasive. At any given moment, the most obscure historical period is the one that is still within living memory. There are too many vested interests at stake. Too much material is in private hands, and in the hands of the Mitford sisters documents could appear and disappear unaccountably. Kaplan began work just as her subject was slipping over the time horizon. Though they never met, Kaplan talked to surviving friends and family, including Debo, with whom she spent a day in 2008. As well as the depth of her well-digested research, Kaplan’s strength is that she writes about Decca, as she sensibly decides to call her in most contexts, as ‘an American communist’ with an unusual background in the English aristocracy. The more familiar British attitudes to Decca range from benign but limited admiration for the amusing author of Hons and Rebels and The American Way of Death to antipathy. She has been cast as ‘a malcontent whose childhood was ideal and her bitterness about it … “inexplicable”’. A daughter-in-law of Diana, who married Oswald Mosley, spent much of the Second World War in prison with her husband and never renounced her belief in fascism or her support for Hitler, felt that it was Jessica who was temperamentally lacking: an adolescent rebel who never grew up or acquired that ‘well-adjusted disposition’ – the mental equivalent of deportment – which made Debo so content. Kaplan deals with this briskly enough, as symptomatic of ‘a certain absence of social curiosity … at the heart of the British aristocracy’, but not all aristocrats are so complacent. Where Decca was perhaps an outlier in her family was that she possessed a degree of empathy, something none of her sisters appears to have had. She alone noticed that the people who lived in the cottages on her parents’ estate had bad teeth and inadequate clothes, and she was never content with the view, accepted not only among the aristocracy during her childhood, that ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’ were part of a divinely ordered social structure.

Rebellion set in early. When she was eleven, in 1928, Decca started saving up. Drummonds Bank wrote to ‘respectfully beg leave to acknowledge receipt of ten shillings as initial deposit in your Running Away Account … We remain, dear Madam, your obedient servants’ etc. Her first vision of freedom was in the form of the fashionable new interwar housing type, the ‘bedsitting room’. When her older sister Nancy got one in London, she was first jealous and then dismayed when Nancy gave it up. The rising tide of underclothes had been too much: ‘I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.’ Even by the standards of the time, the Mitfords’ childhood was removed from the realities of life. Edwardian conventions, which were giving way elsewhere, hung on at Swinbrook, the family’s ugly country house in Oxfordshire, known unaffectionately as Swinebrook. The shibboleth most resented by Decca was the refusal to educate girls properly, though her later career was helped by the fact that she was an autodidact. She brought an innocent eye and extra determination to her subject matter, but the lack of formal schooling rankled. Her parents were still, mentally, Victorians and Kaplan gives brief but revealing accounts of their earlier lives. David, whose career as ‘a soldier and a gentleman’ had cost him a lung but no qualms about the rightness of the empire, married Sydney Bowles in 1904. Sydney, who emerges from Kaplan’s book as more sensitive and more practical than is generally supposed, had lost her own mother young and learned to cope with a tyrannical father who took his four children to sea for a year on his yacht. (In the course of the voyage, the children got lice and he got their governess pregnant.) The first time Sydney and David met she was fourteen. On that occasion, she got a fishbone stuck in her throat at dinner and, knowing better than to mention it, saved her own life by going upstairs and removing the bone with a button hook. Once married, the Redesdales lived and raised their children in the aristocratic discomfort they took for granted. When Decca first stayed with well-off Americans she was astonished by the absence of ‘cold bathwater, electric lights that don’t work, inedible food’ and draughts that characterised the stately homes of England.

It was partly an attempt to keep warm that drove the sisters to the large airing cupboard, known to them as the Hons Cupboard (Hons being either slang for ‘hens’ or simply used to mean ‘people’, but not short for their titles). Here the sisters huddled and talked, and the Mitford mythos began with their own stories, quarrels and teases. Asked later in life to confirm whether the bond with her sisters had ‘stood between her and life’s cruel circumstances’, Decca replied: ‘Sisters were life’s cruel circumstances.’ She would never escape her family and its entanglements, but she was serious about running away. The opportunity came when she met her distant cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, a natural rebel and a charmer of flexible principles. He had already run away from school and been one of the first Englishmen to go to Spain to fight Franco. He saw action at Boadilla del Monte and had been invalided home when Decca met him at a country-house weekend party and asked if he was going back. He was and she inquired whether ‘you could possibly take me with you?’ He could and he did.

It was in one sense a rebellion, and at the same time a conventional upper-class marriage through the looking-glass: their families were related, they belonged to the same social circles, and their similar upbringings had fitted them for nothing practical. The experience of Spain was a combination of tragedy and farce. Decca was homesick and Romilly so inept he could barely tie his shoelaces. Since they weren’t married, the Mitford parents went to law to try to get their underage daughter back (Sydney also sent out copies of Vogue). Unity, Decca’s favourite sister, by now a committed Nazi and personal friend of Hitler, was in Germany and confided her worries about Decca to the Führer, who was apparently very consoling. As Europe slid towards war the sisters shared the front pages with the international situation: ‘Mixed Up Mitford Girls Still Confusing Europe’. Decca, a naive 19-year-old, was under Romilly’s sway, and his charm had its dark side. He attempted to cut her off from her family rather than win them round. He had a flexible attitude to truth and was light-fingered even with his friends’ possessions. The couple married eventually in Bayonne in 1937, after Decca got pregnant, and came back to England. Their daughter Julia was born in London in the communal house they had taken in Rotherhithe; she died at five months of measles. The district nurse had assumed that the baby, being breast-fed, would acquire her mother’s immunity. But Decca and her sisters had been brought up in such isolation they had never had measles. Decca said almost nothing about this first great grief, but Kaplan sees its implications running as a thin vein through the rest of her life. Decca shared the family distaste for expressed emotion (except, in her own case, outbursts of wild enthusiasm). Kaplan construes this as a peculiarly aristocratic tendency but it is perhaps more generally English. There is a national tendency to avoid discussion of anything ‘unpleasant’, a preference for a register somewhere between stoicism and repression.

Having no more idea than Nancy about everyday life, Decca and Romilly were astonished to get bills for gas and electricity. After some months hiding from creditors, they decided to go to America. Romilly’s proposal (‘plan’ is too strong a word for the various grandiose projects he conceived; he was, as Decca remarked, ‘congenitally incapable of dwelling on the pitfalls … in a situation’) was to embark on a lecture tour. Suggested topics included ‘How to Meet the King’ and ‘Sex Life at Oxford University’. In fairness, he was qualified to talk about both. In the US, as Unity’s sister and Churchill’s nephew they were instant stars, the ‘Blueblood Adventurers’. They did some journalism but no lecturing. Attempts to find work gave Decca an early encounter with the inequalities she would spend the rest of her life fighting. She had no luck with applications until someone told her that ‘colour’ meant skin colour not hair. She stopped writing ‘brown’, started writing ‘white’, and immediately got a job. In 1939 she was selling tweeds in the Merrie England Village at the New York World’s Fair; she would never settle permanently in England again. For a natural rebel, emigration has advantages. Kaplan teases out the nuances of Decca’s self-presentation in America as an insider or outsider according to need. She knew when to dial up the English aristocrat, presumably good for tweed sales in the Merrie England Village, and when to let it drop. Some friends thought she deployed her most aristocratic vowels when arguing ‘with recalcitrant Americans’, but she could play both sides against the middle. When Debo came to visit after the war, she was appalled, reporting back to Diana that ‘the accent is what struck me most … she not only does the accent but says completely American sentences.’ As Decca’s career in political activism and investigative journalism developed, she used variants. Researching The American Way of Death, her exposé of the exploitative funeral trade, Decca appeared in undertakers’ offices in the form of ‘a smart, slightly dowdy, vaguely eccentric housewife, carrying a small notebook in her large black handbag’. She had no interest in fashion – her sisters were dismayed by her lack of taste in clothes – but she could dress for a part. On her 34th birthday, she was on the stand in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, carefully dressed in ‘a pastel-coloured suit with a rounded, feminine collar and a dark silk blouse’ accessorised with the swept-up cat-eye glasses that were the respectable lady’s eyewear of the day. She got off.

Her public image was never wholly under her control, however. Kaplan suggests that the early years in America as one half of ‘a funny couple’ dogged her long after it bore any relation to the facts. By 1940, Romilly was training with the Canadian forces and Decca, pregnant again, was working in a department store while reading her way through five volumes of Roosevelt’s speeches. Across the Atlantic, the Mitford myth was becoming florid. Unity attempted suicide at the outbreak of war and was brought home with a bullet in her brain, never fully to recover. Diana, who had left her first husband for Mosley, was interned in Holloway Prison. Nobody could say the sisters weren’t serious about their ideals. For Decca, the war years brought different horrors. A daughter was born and named Constancia, after Constancia de la Mora, who had renounced her aristocratic Spanish family to fight fascism. Alone with her baby, Decca was under constant surveillance by the FBI, suspected of communist sympathies because of Romilly and fascist leanings because of her sisters. Another pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in a gas station toilet. Romilly was by this time a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was reported missing over the North Sea in November 1941, but it was many months before Decca could be brought to believe that he was dead. Their friends agreed it seemed so unlike him.

The war broke the Mitford family. Afterwards it reformed along different lines. The Redesdales’ marriage was a permanent casualty. Sydney, who never wavered in her sympathy for fascism, left her husband. Churchill, who spent Christmas at the White House in 1941, sent for Decca and apologised for jailing the Mosleys. He explained that he had arranged for other prisoners to clean and housekeep for them. Decca was furious. She told Churchill that she blamed the Mosleys and their followers for the war and for Romilly’s death. Disconcerted, Churchill gave her $500, which she badly needed, but she said it was ‘blood money’ and donated it to her friend Virginia Durr’s campaign against the poll tax. Their meeting may, Kaplan suggests, have been behind Churchill’s noticeable gloom that Christmas and his ‘retreat into silence’ at the White House dinner. In 1945, Tom Mitford was killed in action at the age of 36. Decca wrote to her mother that she ‘couldn’t think of anything comforting to say’ because he had been lost to such a ‘magnificent cause’. In truth, nobody ever had much to say about Tom. Decca’s praise for him was negative; the only sibling who was not a ‘hater’, he remains an empty outline amid the glare of his sisters’ personalities, the real ‘unknown Mitford’. Sydney managed the heroic feat of keeping on terms with all her daughters, sending Decca magazine cuttings and dealing gamely with requests to ‘ring up the Daily Worker … & ask them whether they know of any interesting mass meetings or demonstrations’, though she was baffled by some of Decca’s news, admitting she had no idea what a trade union was. Unity died in 1948 at the age of 33. Decca never renounced her. She was the sister she had loved most because ‘her dissatisfaction with life mirrored my own.’ Perhaps it was the unexpressed anger and sorrow about Unity that fuelled her implacable hostility to Diana.

By the end of the war, Decca was transformed. Adolescent ‘dissatisfaction’ with the order of things found focus in the Communist Party and the civil rights movement. She was now a naturalised American citizen, living in San Francisco with her second husband, the Jewish lawyer and communist Bob Treuhaft. There could be no going back. The intellect that developed through her programme of political self-education was ‘detail-oriented and disciplined’, but she retained a useful obliviousness to forms and norms, as well as a capacity to reinvent her life from scratch. She had several careers ahead of her, as activist, author, teacher and public figure. Planning was one of her strengths, but, as Kaplan observes, ‘pivots were her superpower.’ The war years saw the biggest pivot. From then on her life was part of American political history and Kaplan’s perspective as an American historian allows her biography to expand into the fervid politics of the postwar years. By 1945, there was already a climate of fear on the left. The failure of Durr’s campaign against the poll tax was more than a single setback. Durr and her lawyer husband, Clifford, were now ‘in the crosshairs’ of Congressman Martin Dies, scourge of suspected left-wing government workers. ‘Both our families had come over here in the early 1700s,’ Durr wrote, ‘and had fought in the Revolutionary War. We had a sense … that we owned the country … I felt absolutely safe. I was an American.’ Nobody felt that kind of safety again for the next 25 years. By 1948, Communist Party members were being arrested as part of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to prove that Marxism advocated violence. Marxist beliefs, even if not acted on, were crimes.

Decca was assistant director of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress, which issued a document with the title ‘We Charge Genocide’. It detailed cases of violence, lynching and the racism that was ‘everywhere in American life’, creating a climate of ‘psychological terror and mass intimidation’. The Treuhafts and their friends were constantly watched and expected arrest at any moment. Decca remained aware of her privilege as a white woman, and of her relatively comfortable material status. She and Bob had paid work and they had a growing family (Constancia now had two young half-brothers). But any interaction with authority – a doctor’s visit, a child’s registration at school – might trigger a denunciation. While the image of 1950s middle-class America sent waves of aspirational envy across the Atlantic for its shiny kitchens, breakfast cereal and Chevrolets, the Jim Crow laws remained in place. Opinion polls suggested 80 per cent of Americans thought that communists should lose their citizenship. Kaplan conveys the grinding sense of oppression felt over decades by anyone thought to be ‘radical’. The Treuhafts and their friends battled on while losing their own right to passports or to organise legally. Of the individual cases on which they campaigned, one of the bleakest was that of Willie McGee, a Black man accused of rape and hastily convicted on inadequate evidence. After six years of trials, appeals and two lynching attempts, the case had become a national cause célèbre. McGee was executed on 8 May 1951; the execution by electric chair was broadcast live on local radio.

Through these years, Decca made a number of pivots. She and Treuhaft, who got passports in 1955, and managed to leave the country before the issuing authority realised its mistake, returned from a carefully choreographed trip to Hungary full of enthusiasm. By 1958, after the uprising, they had realised their mistake and left the Communist Party. There were some high spots amid the slog: Decca driving Josephine Baker to visit a prisoner in San Quentin, and later rescuing Johnny Cash’s $10,000 donation to the Folson Inmates Welfare Fund, which had not found its way to the prisoners. Personally, she suffered two great traumas. In 1955, her elder son, Nicholas, was knocked down by a car and killed while out on his bicycle on a paper round. Decca said almost nothing. She took down the photographs of him and went to bed with flu. There was no mention of him in her memoir. ‘Forging ahead,’ Kaplan explains, was her way of coping.

The year before saw a more complicated episode about which Decca said a great deal, giving so many contradictory versions that Kaplan can only set out the evidence and consider the implications. Walking alone at night to a meeting, Decca was attacked by a young Black man. In most versions of the story, her husband, on his way to the same meeting, heard the noise and rescued her. Much later she told a friend she had been raped, and Kaplan concludes that this was most probably the case. Decca saw a doctor but refused to report an offence that would risk a Black man’s life. It was a grimly ironic predicament for a defender of Willie McGee, and one that touches on another aspect of her subject’s character that Kaplan teases out, her attitudes to sex and to feminism. Decca made jokes about rape, complaining that American feminists made ‘too much fuss about sex’. Most of her closest friends, including Durr and later Maya Angelou, were prominent feminists but it was a cause she never took up. The consciousness-raising of Adrienne Rich and other white American feminists would always have been uncongenial in its appeal to introspection – ‘grubbing about’ as Decca called it. She argued that anti-pornography campaigners played into the hands of right-wing censorship. Kaplan adds that Decca herself was ‘not very sexual’. Perhaps, also, she felt that an involvement in feminism would be self-indulgent, too much like doing something for herself. It is noticeable that none of her campaigns benefited her own immediate interests.

For her sisters​ , Decca’s life’s work came under the heading of ‘politics’ in which they took no interest unless personally involved. Debo, who became duchess of Devonshire in 1950, was sister-in-law to Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s sister. By the time he became president her sisters were convinced that Debo was having an affair with him. So Mitford-centric was their universe it seemed obvious that Kennedy’s address to the nation on 22 October 1962 would be an abdication speech, à la Edward VIII, announcing his love for Debo. The Cuban Missile Crisis came as a terrible disappointment. Two years later, when Hons and Rebels topped the bestseller lists alongside Joy Adamson’s Born Free, Diana wrote to the TLS calling it ‘grotesque’, while Nancy, fuelled by professional as well as personal resentment, patronised it as ‘easy to read & very funny in parts’. Debo complained in private that she would ‘never understand’ why Decca was so bitter about her family’s fascist sympathies.

After Sydney died in 1963 – her resistance to conventional medicine justified by an easy death at home at the age of 83 – the surviving sisters were only all together again once, in 1973, when Nancy was dying in her home at Versailles. She had gone to live in Paris immediately after the war in pursuit of her lover Gaston Palewski, who had married someone else. Around her deathbed, the sisters tried not to quarrel. Decca noted that Diana had aged but not changed (‘like a beautiful … bit of sculpture’) and Diana ‘felt an unexpected sympathy’ for Decca, ‘even affection’. All except Decca agreed that Nancy should not be told that she was dying. Decca, more imaginative than the others, saw that her sister was in intolerable pain and, by lying to the nurse about the dosage, managed to give Nancy enough morphine to speed her end. It was, she later said, ‘the only useful thing’ she did for her. Now in her late fifties Decca had pivoted again and was teaching journalism at Yale. The students loved her. Her unglamorous look – the double-knit suits, undyed greying hair and big handbag – somehow made her seem ‘more radical and genuinely young’ than anyone on campus. But she was not young. Each pivot took more energy than the last. Some of the students noticed that she seemed lonely, and not always sober. Looking after her grandchildren after her daughter’s marriage broke down, she complained of the disruption that she could ‘hardly hear myself drink’.

Tensions between the surviving Mitfords finally erupted, as family rows usually do, over something relatively trivial: a scrapbook. Pamela accused Decca of stealing this family album, which was ‘the size of a table’, and lending it to David Pryce-Jones for his biography of Unity (published in 1976). Decca had been the only sister willing to help him with his research for a book that the others condemned as ‘pornographic’ and ‘Nazis all the way’. Accused of the theft by Debo during a dinner at Chatsworth, Decca fled in tears. It says much about the depths and complexities of her character that, having said so little about so much, she was open about her misery when faced with her sisters’ united front. She lapsed into a ‘sad haze’, a ‘sort of non-stop condition of mourning’. It was ‘one of the worst things’ that had ever happened to her. Some months later, the scrapbook turned up. It was on a table at Chatsworth, where it had been all along. Debo’s cheery telegram announcing ‘All’s well’ and her breezy explanation that the reappearance was ‘very odd indeed’ were scarcely adequate, but Decca was grateful to be reconciled with the family she had spent so long running away from.

The last years of her life brought more illness, along with the devastating revelation of Bob’s long affair with their friend Joanne Grant. He told Decca about it only when it was over. She was baffled as much as hurt, and also, Kaplan suggests, ashamed. Her solid marriage had been her trump card over the sisters with their divorces, infidelities and heartbreaks. Through whatever ‘private negotiation’ the Treuhafts stayed together. Meanwhile, as the Mitford industry boomed, Decca’s past began to overtake her. The publication of Nancy’s letters opened new wounds, revealing the spiteful way her sisters had discussed her behind her back. For all this, Kaplan conveys a sense of a life lived all the way to the end. Decca continued to make new friends, including Nora Ephron, Salman Rushdie and Hillary Rodham, who she thought was too good for Bill Clinton. She died of cancer at home on 23 July 1996. ‘It is so ODD to be dying,’ she wrote, from her downstairs bedroom to Bob, who was asleep upstairs. ‘I must just jot a few thoughts … I’ve SO enjoyed life with you.’

Debo thought Decca had had a ‘tragic life’, but that is not the story Kaplan tells in an account which is, willy-nilly, a contribution to the Mitford industry. Decca was always famous for her family, much to her annoyance at times when it was she, rather than the better-qualified Bob, who was asked to endorse a book or speak at an event. The question of whether she would otherwise have made any input to the history of the American civil rights movement is debatable. As a work of Mitfordiana, Kaplan’s book is not entirely fair (none of them is). She is too dismissive of Nancy as a writer and of Debo, whose legacy is as considerable as Decca’s in its way. The Chatsworth estate was crippled by double death duties after the war, and it was largely due to Debo’s determination and ingenuity that one of England’s greatest works of architecture was saved from both terminal decline and the National Trust. As the age that ended with the last of the Mitfords fades, it becomes clear that great houses which continue to be inhabited while publicly accessible live and grow, while those that are only tourist sites risk becoming arid. Kaplan is also sometimes wrong. Although Unity was conceived by apt coincidence in Swastika, Ontario, she was not born there but in London. Not everything that Kaplan attributes to Hon-speak is their coinage; ‘frenemy’ is American in origin and ‘Abyssinia’ for ‘I’ll be seeing you’ was common. None of this is significant and at times Kaplan’s vagueness is positively refreshing. Nancy’s much rhapsodised Louis XVI salon was indeed full of ‘delicate, uncomfortable French furniture’ and that is no doubt the way Decca saw it.