Leslie Brody: Irrepressible - The life and Times of Jessica Mitford

The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2010

Toffs remain big box office in Britain as, less classily, does Adolf Hitler. Combine both in one glamorous, self-mythologizing family, and it's easy to see why the six Mitford sisters have helped feed generations of English journalists and historians. The daughters of a wildly eccentric peer, they made a splash in Britain's interwar high society. Two of them then immersed themselves in the more questionable pleasures of fascism—Unity ornamented the Führer's inner circle, and Diana married Oswald Mosley, Britain's would-be Duce.

Meanwhile, Jessica (1917-96), the fifth sister, known as Decca, took a different course, to civil-war Spain (against Franco). What followed—as Leslie Brody outlines in "Irrepressible," the first biography of this particular Mitford—was an existence filled with the clichés of an Internationale-set life. Boho revolt in London and America, marriage to a left-wing Jewish lawyer (take that, Diana!), and Communist Party membership. She stuck up for spies (the Rosenbergs, naturally); she was harassed by the U.S. government (subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, of course); and, on occasion, she did brave, marvelous things. These were usually in connection with the struggle for civil rights: 1950 found her in Jackson, Miss., campaigning to save a prisoner lost in the state's lethal legal labyrinth. A decade later Mitford was a Freedom Rider.

But some freedoms were more equal than others. Jessica quit the Communist Party, tellingly late, in 1957. That was a year after the popular uprising in Hungary, a country that she had managed to visit in 1955 without finding much amiss, an example of a blindness all too typical of her life-long attitude toward the left—unforgivable, given the clarity with which she could see when she chose.

Her "The American Way of Death" (1963) was a brutally clever examination of the scams and sharp practices of the funeral business. It established her as a muckraking journalist, and it paved the way for her role as a droll, rickety, radical grande dame—a performance that only ended in 1996 with her funeral (costing $475, Ms. Brody informs us).

"Irrepressible" is a brisk, engaging and mainly admiring work, but the author—best known for "Red Star Sister," a memoir of her own years as an activist in the 1960s counterculture—seems neither worried nor terribly interested that Jessica hung on in a largely Stalinist party long past the usual wartime excuse, something that a more critical biographer might have used to suggest that the red sheep of the Mitford family was not so different from Diana and Unity after all.

Why all three women succumbed to the totalitarian temptation is to be found in their times, in their genes and in the brilliant mess of an upbringing that muddled the aesthetics of Blandings with the ethics of Berchtesgarten. But not, alas, in Ms. Brody's book.