Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Mitfords make fascinating reading, June 4, 2002
The Mitfords - six sisters, their brother and two parents make for fascinating reading and there have been a few biographies, autobiographies and of course the semi-autobiographical novels of Nancy which have managed to fuel the publics desire to hear more. Lovell's biography of the family is more than just the most recent book. It makes use of all the sisters letters and notes (access hasn't always been allowed in the past - especially to Decca's private papers) and it also helps to shed light on the positives and negatives of all the works which have been published in the Mitford collection.Lovell , whose work I very much admire, has the art of discussing with judging - either her subjects or their previous biographers. I feel she leaves the judgement to the reader to make, and in this case it is a very good thing. The Mitford family had a very controversial set of characters. Nancy with her 'teases' was perhaps the most outrageous within the family, but publically there was the divorce of Diana in the 1930's followed by her seemingly long affair with Moseley (the leader of the British Fascists) and her later marriage and unapologetic support for him and their cause. Unity Mitford is famous, or should I say infamous, for her long friendship with Hitler. Decca ran away from home with her cousin at the age of about 18 and went to Spain to support the Communists in the Spanish Civil War of 1936. She later married her cousin Esmond and went to live in America where she remained very much cut off from her family - mostly it seems for reasons of her own. The other two sisters, Pamela and Debo led quieter lives and in Debo's case only marginally less interesting. All in all the girls were just fascinating indeed. Lovell starts her book with a brief summary of what isn't going to be in it. The introduction covers the material which has been done before (try the biography by Jonathon Guiness, Diana's son, if you want to read more on this) and then the material which _will_ be in it. Much of the book is rehashed to some extent - well it has to be doesn't it as there is only so much new material and much of the old stuff is just as interesting. It also needs to be there to shed light on the new material which Lovell includes later. Each chapter is done in date order so all the sisters are followed up in each section, although for obvious reasons some are mentioned more than others - for instance, Unity dominates the early thirties, Decca, the later thirties, This new material includes the use of Decca's papers and letters, and much of this is made use of in the latter portion of the book. Whereas there seems to be very little about Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire or Pamela the quiet 'rural' Mitford. I suppose with the Duchess still alive there might be problems with using too much material on her or maybe, like Pamela there is not that much controversial which would make it interesting. Nevertheles, what is used is well worth it as it gives insight into the problems the landowning peers had in the 1930's with death taxes and inheritance. If nothing else this family is deadly funny. Nancy showed that in her novels Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate ( and her other novels of course but those two really are her very best work). The family seem to have an inordinate amount of charm, shart intellegence and wit which was present from their childhood. Despite none of them having more than a cursory formal education, they were taught by a series of governesses with varying levels of commitment (one spent the whole time teaching them to play a card game called Racing Demon) - they all seemed to have taken on very formidable careers and excelled at them. Lovell is unable to show quite why they all excelled as they did - perhaps it was all hereditary as they had exceptional grandparents - but she certainly does expose a very talented family and a funny one. This book is a wonderfully easy read about a wonderfully funny interetsting family.
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A readable and entertaining look at social history/biography, September 17, 2002
This carefully researched and constructed biography of the six Mitford sisters, Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah, and their brother, Tom, is a fascinating look not only of their lives but at the time in which they lived. The reader is drawn into the world of minor British aristocracy and is treated to characters who, although somewhat eccentric at times, seem much like people we know: Parents are well-intentioned if somewhat misled, children are willful and spoiled. Life, however, is frivolous and carefree in an increasingly dangerous and threatening world. It's easy to understand where Nancy got her sense of humor and her ability to write social satire -- it was bred into the bone.It's also understandable (and not at all uncommon) that the older siblings found some measure of success while the younger ones behaved like the over-indulged, spoiled children they were and never seemed to cease to be. The reader who remembers (and the student of) the early- and mid-20th century will recognize the famous names that wander through these pages with the infamous family: Aly Khan, Winston Churchill, Katharine Graham, Diana Cooper, Evelyn Waugh and more -- it's a star-studded group of friends, relatives and acquaintances that touch and often seriously influence the lives of the Mitfords. I loved this book. The story is fascinating and almost surreal as it unfolds through the girls' schooling, debutante years and various adult exploits played against the backdrop of the developing World War and its aftermath. Lovell has done a superb job of presenting the zeigeist of their era and their lives in a readable and entertaining text.
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40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Flawed Masterpiece, September 20, 2003
To begin, the author has done an outstanding job of research, compilation, and organization. Quite a balancing act with multiple subjects, and the author has superbly achieved her feat. This said, the biography has too many serious flaws for it to be given the rave notices of most reviewers. I'm afraid most readers are too enchanted by the fascinating lives of these highly unusual women and, thus,have not critically approached the book. The author has provided us with a literary tea party with her subjects, but other than the superficial facts of their lives, she has provided us with only an elementary analysis or understanding of who and what they were, and more importantly, how and why they got that way. Perhaps a more thorough grounding in psychology could have benefited the writer in her profession. The unique characters of David and Sydney Mitford are the key to understanding their daughters. Both of them had troubled emotional lives that were fully transfered genetically and environmentally to their offspring. Sydney lost her mother at a very young age and emotionally "shut down" for the rest of her life. A paragon of virtue, totally devoted to her family, she was like a dead-pan, sonombalant iceberg. It must have been maddening to these six girls to have such an outwardly unfeeling, unaffectionate mother. Imagine how it must have felt to know that nothing you did, even threatening suicide by jumping off the manor roof, could ever do more than raise a polite and tranquil eyebrow of your mother and elicit only a supremely detached and blaise reaction. And the father - even as a boy it seems apparent that he had mental problems - just not eccentricity - but blind rages that alienated him from his boyhood family. As a father, David deeply loved his children but completely undermined them by his relentless volcanic fits of rage. His good side was his sharp, sarcastic humor which amused his children, but sadly taught them that it was the only acceptable vehicle for expressing their emotions. Thus, the four famous daughters adopted a sharp-tongued pose to hide their damaged emotions. There's way too much of these things to go into at any depth here. Suffice it to say, the author failed to give her subjects the psychological analysis and understanding that they were screaming for their entire lives. She also failed to give an objective view of the British caste system and way of life that helped create their attitudes, such as the emotional sterile childhoods of he upper classes that necessitates the life-long use of childish nicknames. Nicknames are almost a sub-theme of the book, but the author fails to note their importance in both helping to keep the users securely attached to their meager childhoods with their nannies in the nursery and also to perpetuate the upper class eliteness of having a private club with secret passwords - you know you belong because you use the ridiculous childhood nickname - thus today you could not be more upper class than if you referred to Her Majesty the Queen as "Lillibet". As for the technical, a good editor is screamed for here. The author has no gift for sentence construction or the usage of words. She loves introducing a sentence with a dependant clause that has nothing to do with the subject of the sentence. It is so often confusing and irritating - the reader has to skip back a few sentences to see what she's referring to. An example: "Indulging in these constant volcanic eruptions with loud shouts and dangerously flashing blue eyes, the house was not a pleasant place to be." Now, where's the editor? It's absurd that an author be allowed to drop or confuse her subject noun literally dozens of times in a book. And the sloppy choice of pronouns is also confusing and sometimes disastrous. When five or six women are previously mentioned by name, and then the author proceeds to refer back to one of them with the "she" pronoun, you have to almost disect the paragraph to figure out which she is being referred to. Like I said, a great researcher this author certainly is - a great organizer - but a very untalented writer, and, alas, a very mediocre biographer who lacks the skills of critical analysis and intellectual understanding to give these fascinating subjects the presentation that they truly deserve. But a worthy attempt. Once again, WHERE WAS THE COPY EDITOR?!
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