In 2025, the Mitford industrial complex belched out of its smokestack a miniseries titled Outrageous. Mythmaking and the perpetual nostalgia for wacky British aristocrats have all too often distorted the truth about the infamous Mitford sisters—Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah, born between 1904 and 1920 to David Mitford-Freeman, Second Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney. Would this glossy BritBox show portray the family with subtlety and nuance? Place them accurately in history? Reveal both their talents and their grotesqueries? I suspected not.

My suspicions were merited. Outrageous reduces these complex women to cartoon figures and treats the ideological struggle of their day and within their family—literally, between Communism and fascism—as though it were a Gryffindor-versus-Slytherin food fight, while entirely whitewashing the barbaric anti-Semitism of the elders.

So it was a relief to discover, a few pages into Rachel Trethewey’s Muv: The Story of the Mitford Girls’ Mother, that far from ignoring Sydney’s odious views, Trethewey sets out to explain why such an otherwise gracious and cultured woman might hold them. Although her book does not equal the condemnatory power of David Pryce-Jones’s 1977 masterful Unity Mitford: A Quest, it shares Pryce-Jones’s seriousness of purpose.

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Born Sydney Bowles, the woman later nicknamed “Muv” by her children lost her own mother at age seven. Her father, Thomas Bowles, was a magazine proprietor who launched Vanity Fair and later sat in Parliament as a Conservative. Thomas bragged about his independence of mind and uncompromising convictions. “As to the thing we really know, and as to the thing we really believe, no one of us can admit of toleration,” he once wrote. Although, like many in his class, he heartily disliked Jews, he embraced Mosaic dietary laws, believing they helped Jewish people stay healthy. “Pork products were banned from the house, and rabbit, hare and shellfish were never eaten,” Trethewey writes. Thomas became Sydney’s model in all things. Like him, she tended to view the world in black-and-white terms, and she shared his reflexive anti-Semitism. (Pryce-Jones actually ran across her copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and found passages underlined and comments including “Too true!” and “I always said so” scrawled in the margins.) After Sydney married David Mitford in 1903 and set up housekeeping in a series of Cotswold manor houses, she adhered to the kashrut–inspired rules her father followed.

Sydney eventually gave birth to six girls and a sole son, Tom. She and her husband spent time in Canada, where David prospected unsuccessfully for gold. Late in 1913, their fifth child, Unity Valkyrie, was conceived in the northern Ontario town of Swastika—a fact, along with the names chosen for her, that came to seem prophetic to her.

At home, the Mitford offspring created a culture of teasing, pranks, private languages, and intense competition among spirited girls cooped up in the country, not allowed to go to school. (Tom went off to Eton.) In her bestselling 1945 comic novel The Pursuit of Love—the wellspring of Mitford-mania—eldest daughter Nancy makes it all seem like so much posh good fun. But in Hons and Rebels, a memoir published in 1960, Jessica is candid about the boredom and frustration she and her closest-in-age sister, Unity, felt, and how that discontent ended up widening the divide that split their family apart.

The Mitfords were fated to live in polarized times. In the 1930s, as Britain slid into the Depression, Nancy turned socialist, while Sydney, a stalwart of the local Conservative women’s club, feared a Bolshevik-type revolution. Meanwhile, Diana, restless and unfulfilled in her marriage to brewery heir Bryan Guinness, met Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. This handsome, charismatic, hard-charging man could rescue the nation, Diana was convinced, and she desired to be at his side. To her parents’ horror, Diana abandoned her husband and moved to a house in Eaton Square to conduct an affair with Mosley, who remained married.

Still stuck at home, lacking purpose, and absorbing the drama and arguments among their elders, Unity and Jessica also picked sides. Unity announced she was a fascist while Jessica pledged allegiance to the Communists. “At first, their different ideologies did not come between the sisters and they were still united against the grown-ups,” Trethewey writes. The teenagers put up competing banners in their playroom and staged mock battles. After Unity turned 18 in 1932, she “came out” as a debutante, expressing her disdain for the ritual by bringing along a pet rat to balls. When the next year she announced—with typical Mitfordian bravado—that she intended to move to Germany to meet Hitler, her parents, exhausted by their disruptive daughter, let her go.

Unity haunted the Osteria Bavaria, Hitler’s favorite Munich lunch spot, for months until she attracted his attention. “Whether it was her Aryan looks or her aristocratic connections, Hitler was flattered by Unity’s admiration, and soon included her in his inner circle,” Trethewey reports. Her mother came to visit in April 1935, and Unity took her to tea with Hitler. Sydney, wary at first, was gradually won over by the dictator. She likened him to Admiral Nelson, a great hero of her father’s, and praised the “marvelous” things Hitler was undertaking to restore Germany’s greatness. Sydney’s husband, David, likewise came to look kindly on Hitler and the Nazi project, despite the hatred he had felt for Germans as a soldier in World War I. In a letter to the Times, he described Hitler “as a right-thinking man of irreproachable sincerity and honesty.”

The Mitford parents were furious with Unity when she took up with Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer, who in July 1935 printed a letter by her attacking British Jews in which she declared, “I want everyone to know that I am a Jew hater.” But it was the critical fallout in the British press more than Unity’s opinions that bothered Sydney
and David. Jessica later claimed that she showed her parents graphic accounts of the persecution of the Jews by Hitler’s Stormtroopers, but they brushed the reports aside. When Hitler invited them to the Nazi Parteitag rally at Nuremberg in 1938, Lord and Lady Redesdale happily accepted.

Diana married Mosley, now a widower, in 1936 in Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin drawing room, and Hitler was the guest of honor. The next spring, Jessica nailed her Communist colors to the mast by running away to the Spanish Civil War with her second cousin, Esmond Romilly. London newspapers pounced on this latest Mitford scandal with glee. In her memoir, Jessica describes how Nancy, sent out to Spain to persuade her sister to come home, made an illuminating comment about press coverage of Jessica’s elopement: “You were the first one in the family to be on posters.… [Unity] was frightfully jealous.”

Perhaps because Unity’s proclamations were so often over-the-top and attention-seeking, her family didn’t believe her vows to kill herself should Germany and Britain go to war. Her parents also hated the prospect of war. After the Munich agreement, Sydney wrote a letter of praise to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, adding, “Hitler, whom I know personally, is above all a person of heart.” When Mosley spoke at an enormous “peace” rally at Earl’s Court Exhibition Hall in London in July 1939 and gave the fascist salute, Lord and Lady Redesdale, along with Tom and Diana, attended to support him. “The Mitfords were now described as ‘the first family of fascism’ in Britain,” Trethewey writes.

Upon the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939, Unity went to the Englischer Garten in Munich and shot herself in the temple with a small pearl-handled pistol gifted to her by Hitler for her personal protection. She survived, but her parents had no news of her for months. Meanwhile in Britain, David immediately recanted his support for the Nazis, saying to the Daily Mirror: “The King’s enemies are now the enemies of every honest Englishman. I made a mistake.” His wife renounced nothing and blamed Winston Churchill, not Hitler, for the war. “It was to be the biggest act of defiance of her life,” Trethewey writes. “Beneath the conventional façade she was as great a rebel as any of her daughters.”

Only in December 1939 did the Mitfords learn that Unity had been gravely injured in her suicide attempt and that the bullet was still lodged in her skull. Hitler arranged for a hospital train to take Unity to neutral Switzerland; her mother and sister Deborah went to Bern to fetch her.

Back at home, distraught over world events, now caring for a brain-damaged and incontinent 25-year-old daughter, Sydney began quarreling incessantly with David. He, in turn, was furious with her and her refusal to acknowledge that Unity’s obsession with Hitler had ruined her life. “It was very painful for both Sydney and David.…But they could not find the common ground to live together anymore,” Trethewey writes.

Sydney’s caretaking duties increased after Mosley and Diana were locked up in Holloway Prison as threats to national security. Sydney made a grueling seven-hour round-trip journey from the Cotswolds to the London jail every week to spend an allotted 15 minutes with her daughter and pass her fresh food. Nancy disdained Diana, called her “Mrs. Quisling,” and never visited. Doing her bit for the war effort, Nancy, with her father’s approval, lodged numerous bombed-out Londoners and Jewish refugees in the family’s Kensington mansion.

The war’s conclusion brought little comfort to the Mitfords, devastated by the loss of Tom, whom everyone in the family loved and got on with, killed in action in Burma in March 1945. Unity died of meningitis, a consequence of her old gunshot wound, in May 1948. But the publication of The Pursuit of Love in 1945 brought Nancy the literary renown she had always longed for and, incredibly, managed to transform the public’s perception of the family, “making them known more for their amusing eccentricities than their controversial views,” Trethewey writes. Aunt Sadie, the character in the novel based on Sydney, is an innocuous aristocrat who floats around doing not much. “By downplaying Sydney’s politics…Aunt Sadie loses the essence of who Sydney really was,” notes Trethewey, who admits her own feelings about her subject fluctuated constantly as she wrote Muv. She suggests that she agrees with Jessica Mitford, who came to see Sydney as two different people, a loyal and resilient mother on the one hand, and an obstinate individualist with detestable politics on the other.

This evaluation, while adequate, led me back to Pryce-Jones to be reminded of his take on the Mitfords. Lord and Lady Redesdale, in his view, were essentially incurious about the world, ensconced in a privileged, self-satisfied pocket of it and “expected their children to be like themselves. Faced with originality, they were defenceless.
The onslaught of Unity…was to knock them down flat.” And what motivated Unity? Pryce-Jones makes an observation resonant today as legions of cossetted campus radicals march in support of Hamas. Unity, he wrote, was a type, “a society creature who takes advantage of her position to smash it up.” To such young people, “values were of less concern, less style, than the art of rejection.”

We will wait in vain, I fear, for any filmed entertainment that will capture that aspect of the Mitford story.

Photo: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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