Customer Reviews

Hons and Rebels (New York Review Books Classics)

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Proving that the ability to write humorously was not just limited to the more famous Mitford sister, Nancy, Jessica (or Decca as she was known by the family, writes an intentionally hilarious account of the first 20 or so years of her life.

As I am going through a Mitford phase at the moment I thought I would start following up the various biographies and memoirs of the sisters and their children. There were six sisters in this family of eccentric, talented and individual children and one brother who unfortunately was killed in WWII. Jessica, the second youngest of the family was born in 1917 and was in the second half of the family - Nancy, the eldest was born in 1904, so they were never really contemporaries. Jessica's book Hon's and Rebels describes her memories of her home life and early marriage years until just before the death of her first husband in WWII.

Its a marvellous read, and while other Mitford sisters have said that there are parts of this that are untrue, (memories are not necessarily that reliable) it is an easy, witty and fun read and enough reliability in it to not deceive.

I would recommend reading this in conjunction with some of the other broader works of Mitford biographies, I read it with Mary Lovell's recent biography which was helpful = and definitely read Nancy Mitford's first two novels of her series (The pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate) before delving into any Mitford biographies. They are wonderful and draw from her life. Jessica's Memoirs are icing on a wonderful cake. (so to speak)

A great, easy read.

Jessica was in many respects the only Mitford to escape. She did it early and with certainty, drama and flair. The leftist in a confused family of largely fascist and certainly later conservative leanings; Jessica was a 'Bolshie' as Nancy would say. The great pain in her life, that had once been a child's game, was that her favorite sister, Unity, was a Nazi sympathizer and onetime friend of Hitler's. As children, these two would draw the hammer and sickle and schwastikas in competitions each against the other, that ultimately took on more serious proportions. Jessica remained a rebel well into old age.

This book is a love story and a story of breaking free, suffering and surviving. It is also slightly imitative of the works of her older sister, Nancy Mitford, who gained much more celebrity in writing about her upperclass "Hon" sisters and eccentric parents. Interestingly, Nancy found the book to be mean-spirited and somewhat dishonest. I read her thoughts recently in a book of her letters. She did not tell 'Decca' this, but said it openly to many members of her family. Nancy never really opposed the forces and characters in her family- she perhaps improved them in her writing. Her sister was not alligned in that manner- and often felt contempt.
That these girls were brilliant, there is no doubt. The book tells of their made up language, their constant games and spirit that was allowed to flourish, despite the bellowing and controlling father who, in hindsight was pre-occupied with his own fantasies and illusions so that his controls were not as complete as he may have imagined. Also, as with all families,
Farve mellowed by the time the younger children came around.
Jessica fell in love before she actually met her second cousin Esmond Romilly, relative of Churchill and a youthful, avowed Communist. Their story extends to the Spanish Civil War, to the British Embassy in Washington D.C. and ultimately to tragedy and Jessica's rebirth to purely American agenda's, not the least of which was the McCarthy era. The book is less funny than Nancy's but is very worth the read and has its own share of humor. When reading Nancy's letters, I was struck with how deeply she lived within her family throughout her life, despite her French residency. Jessica, seemed less entombed in the Lord Redesdale family, although certainly unforgettably a Mitford, she took the greatest risks, and the most sensational, and committed the gravest offense, that being, emigration to America. I recommend this to anyone intrigued, as I am, by this marvellous family. Jessica was certainly the boldest of the girls.

The fascist, the writer, the country girl, the Nazi, the communist, and the Duchess... the six Mitford sisters are truly one of the most fascinating group of people of the 20th century. This is Jessica "Decca" Mitford's story: she's the communist. A cousin of Winston Churchill, she rebelled early against her eccentic high-society family and eloped with her cousin (not Winston, obviously: a different cousin, who had been kicked out of several prestigious schools for his political beliefs). She witnessed the Spanish Civil War, lunched with Katharine Graham, lost her first husband in WWII, fled the country just in the nick of time to avoid her very own McCarthy hearing, and dedicated her life to uncovering institutional corruption and scamming of the the American public. Through it all, she retained her excellent sense of humor, her undeniable charm, and an unmistakable grace.

It is a little disapointing that this book ends when it does, as Decca certainly continued to lead a fascinating life. However, it is always a priveledge to see inside the Mitford family, especially from the point of view of someone who felt that she was an outsider in the family (whether that was actually true or not is up for discussion).

Hons and Rebels (original American title Daughters and Rebels) was originally published in the 1950s. It is the autobiography of Jessica Mitford Treuhaft from her birth in 1917 up to the death of her first husband in 1941. Jessica Mitford was the next to youngest of the fabulous Mitford sisters, daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale and surely among the most original scions of nobility to ever grace the pages of Burke's Peerage. Jessica is hilarious as she describes her eccentric childhood with Farve and Muv and her siblings Nancy, Diana, Tom, Pam, Unity and Deborah. The tone becomes somewhat (but only somewhat) more serious as she gets into the 1930s, when her sisters Diana and Unity became entranced with Hitler and Fascism and she herself became a committed Communist. Despising the world of the debutantes her parents expected her to enter, Jessica ran away from home to join her cousin and future husband Esmond Romilly in the Spanish Civil War.

After their sensational elopement and marriage Jessica and Esmond lived for a time in the East End of London, then traveled to the US as World War II was about to break out. There Esmond joined the Canadian Air Force and was lost in the North Sea in December, 1941.

Jessica Mitford had a marvelously witty pen, and there's at least one snicker on every page of Hons and Rebels. She was not above embroidering the truth to make the story better, so if you want to get the whole story you will want to check other Mitford histories like Mary Lovell's recent family biography, The Sisters. About twenty years after publishing Hons and Rebels Jessica published a second volume of her autobiography: A Fine Old Conflict, which describes her and second husband's troubles during the McCarthy era in the US. I hope that it will also be republished as it is just as entertaining as Hons and Rebels.

One of my favourite books of all time, Jessica Mitford's Hons and Rebels is her personal account of her childhood as a member of the eccentric, aristocratic family of Lord and Lady Redesdale, and of what happened after that - when she ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War, eloping with a distant cousin. The family were a constant presence in the British press in the first half of the twentieth century, and this book gives the story of their lives from the other side. Impossibly impractical, the author was entirely unprepared for any semblance of independent living - she writes amusingly of her early attempts at housekeeping, including doing the washing-up by washing, drying and putting away each dish before tackling the next one, and sweeping the staircase from the bottom to the top. Personal tragedies, however, are glossed over - the sudden deaths of two of her children are barely mentioned, overshadowed by the family's associations with such famous historical figures as Churchill and Hitler.

As another reviewer mentioned, 'Decca', as she was known, wasn't one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, so don't take every word as gospel - just enjoy this book for what it is, a highly original and amusing memoir.

The Mitford sisters are now immortal, and are one of the most astounding collection of people of their generation. Nancy's pursuit of love, Diana and Unity the facists, Pam and Deborah, the country ladies, and Jessica the communist.

The childhood that Jessica recorded in Hons and Rebels is easily recognisable in The Pursuit of Love, and Love in a Cold Climate.

What happened next was entirely different, while the other sisters were in jail, or shooting themselves, or maintaining huge estates in the country, Jessica married a communist, and relative of Churchill (the Mitfords themselves were relatives of Churchill), who ran away from Eton.

Esmond was killed in the War, and Jessica married again, and began her career as a 'muckraker' - uncovering the incredible and macabre world of American funerals, and being suspected of Un-American Activities.

This book is fascinating, amusing, and, like the stories of all the sisters, quite sad, in a way.

Anybody who is interested in the English Aristocracy of the early 20th Century would do well to read this book.

Wodehouse always averred that he based all his characters (Bertie and chums) on actual characters he had known coming of age in an England roughly contemporaneous with the one Jessica (Decca) Mitford chronicles here. People, even ardent fans, have tended toward the skeptical side regarding Wodehouse's claim. This memoir should lay much of this skepticism to rest. Decca, her sisters and extended family come across as nothing so much as non-fiction Wodehouse - No, not an oxymoron! Above all, this memoir is full of the beauty, eccentricity, insouciance and joy of youth which comes to know sadness and tragedy all too soon.

The only way to effectively convey the rum atmosphere of the rural gentry in which Decca was nurtured - now completely vanished from England - is to proffer some select passages. Here, for example, is the family wending their privileged way to the parish church on a typical Sunday:

"Every Sunday morning, rain or shine, we stumped off down the hill with Nanny, governess, Miranda, several dogs, Boud's goat, Enid, her pet snake, and my pet dove. Some of the graves in Swinbrook churchyard were conveniently surrounded by high railings for better preservation and privacy. These made good cages for the assorted animals, whose loud yelps, cooing and baaing blended nicely with the lusty voices of the village choir and effectively drowned out most of the ten-minute sermon."

And we have eccentric Uncles instead of Wodehouse's eccentric Aunts, but again, real ones:

"Uncle Tommy presided as magistrate at the local police court, and in this capacity doled out his own ideas of justice to the local citizenry. He was particularly proud of having given a three months' jail sentence to a woman driver who accidentally ran her car into a cow on a dark night: `Clap `em in the brig! That's one way of keeping these damn' women off the road.'"

I'm afraid that such options are no longer open to us, fellows!

Of course, most of this book is given to Decca's break with her Wodehousian upbringing, her elopement with Esmond Romilly and ensuing adventures in Spain, the time back in England in the commune on Rotherhithe Street (which, curiously, was the only part of the book which could have been set in England during the 80's when I was an adolescent - just mix in loud music and illicit drugs) and their final idyllic excursion to America. There's a piece on American and British English which is priceless. Americans, you do pronounce your "t" s as "d" s without being aware of it. Don't believe me? - Say "thirty-three" quickly, without thinking! - But that's alright; you remain a much friendlier people and more open society, as Decca and Osmond found.

The ending is circumspect, as befits the onset of war and Osmond's death in it. And, of course, there's much to and fro amongst the Mitfords and their biographers about just how scrupulously honest Decca has been here. But the intrepid reader should put such quibbles aside. As Jessica Mitford puts it here:

"It is perhaps futile to try to interpret the actions of another - one may be so completely wrong;"

And this memoir is so filled with sparkling actions, enchanting circumstances and the wild joys as well as tumbles of any youth worth the having, that I can't imagine any reader not taking delight in it.---I can't think of any laud higher for such a book.

Though she was born into a wonderfully eccentric upper class English family, Jessica Mitford was set on escaping--she started a "running away" savings account at Drummond's Bank in London when she was twelve. At nineteen she eloped with her rebel cousin and they ran away together to the Spanish Civil War--an event that was Huge Big News at the time. Two of her sisters were friends with Hitler, and on hearing what Jessica had done even the poster child for evil was scandalized. (Well, that might have had something to do with her communist politics.)

It's hard not to be captivated by this memoir--Jessica Mitford stopped at nothing to follow her dreams, and so is simultaneously both inspiring and shocking. She was smart and funny, but seemed to give little thought to how her out of bounds actions and petty larcenies would affect others. From reading other Mitford books I know her sisters took issue with some of her facts, and there is a too-good-to-be true quality to parts of the book that's completely forgivable because without them the book wouldn't be as lively or fun. It's maybe telling that, as Jessica reports, her husband regaled some their new American friends with truth-embellished versions of their adventures--to improve the stories, she says.

There is a fascinating inner reflection in the last few pages where Jessica admits that though she and her young husband, Esmond Romily, believed they were entirely "self-made", free agents who had totally escaped any taint of their English aristocratic upbringing, their impatience, carefree intransigence, and supreme self-confidence could be easily traced to their backgrounds.

Jessica Mitford ends this mainly happy book before her husband dies while fighting in World War Two. A great read.

The most fascinating of the illustrious Mitford sisters made the story of her life a page-turner. Not only is the book hilarious, it provides a lively, detailed portrait of the Mitfords and their times. It's hard to believe one family had a role in so many events of the 20th century, from London debutante balls to the rise of the Nazis. Absolutely riveting.

I absolutely loved this book. I had just finished reading the very long and very good "The Sisters" http://www.amazon.com/Sisters-Saga-Mitford-Family/dp/0393324141 about the Mitfords, and wanted more when I was finished. Jessica ("Decca") was the most fascinating of all -- the one who ran away to Spain and America and became widely known for her politics and her book, "The American Way of Death." (and an Oakland resident, like myself, which is always intriguing!)

"Hons and Rebels" is charming, witty, and in its pages is not only an interesting glimpse of life in upper class England between the wars, but a love story as well, as she retells the story the story of her romance with her first husband, Esmond.

I never heard Mitford speak, but her voice comes through strongly in this book -- witty, determined, able to laugh at herself and family, but serious about her politics and trying to get by as a young idealistic couple in America. (And I imagine a very posh British accent...) What I also liked was how she treated the relationship with her closest sister, Unity, who, as a Nazi sympathizer, was the polar political opposite of Decca. What a family.

Highly, highly recommended.