The story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford Girls, a British aristocrat-turned-American Communist, famous for exposés like The American Way of Death.
Doggedly researched and resolutely modern ... Refuses to reduce this most beautifully messy and complicated of Mitfords to bon mots, but her contributions to the language echo on past its rich footnotes.
The sisters...feel appealingly literary — not just in their florid antics but in how they expressed themselves: glibly and colorfully. Their writings are composed of a densely referential, strangely alluring family argot, rich with nicknames and idioms ... To enter the Mitford industry in 2025 is to risk drawing prickly fact checks from devotees steeped in the lore.
Significant ... An apt time for such a book to emerge, particularly from an American historian ... Kaplan quickly dispenses with this generic figure of resistance and dives into what made Decca’s radicalism so singular.
