Hons and Rebels: The Mitford Family Memoir (W&N Essentials)

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Si hay algo que me ha resultado conmovedor es su manera de pasar de puntillas sobre los momentos más dolorosos para ella. Y es en esa falta de detalles y de explica

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford - Goodreads Editions of Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford - Goodreads

Odd pursuits, indeed, and little wonder that my mother’s continual refrain was, ‘You’re very silly children.’Sometimes we would barricade with chairs and stage pitched battles, throwing books and records until Nanny came to tell us to stop the noise. This book reads like a love letter to Esmond Romilly...seen through rose tinted glasses of the past and of a first love. Actually, this article from The New Yorker about Jessica’s letters explains her relationship with her family very well. The past decade of political polarization shows no sign of abating, and it continues to turn not just countries but families against each other. Once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters are becoming once-a-decade disasters in the wake of catastrophic climate change. The world is fundamentally reorganizing itself before our eyes, and in such a destabilizing moment, there is something useful in looking at a family who found its world, too, shifting and changing in ways none of them could have predicted. And who exemplifies that situation better than the Mitfords? Obra de costumbrismo social de la época de entreguerras; biografía sobre una familia que rompió con todos los moldes de su época; ensayo sobre una guerra; crónica sobre un mundo convulso y en pleno cambio; historia iniciativa sobre una joven a la que vemos madurar a través de las páginas que ella misma narra… “Nobles y Rebeldes” es todo eso y más. Pero como señala la acertada introducción que podemos encontrar al principio del libro, lo que subyace en el fondo es una historia de amor breve pero intensa, con una pareja apasionadamente enamorada de ellos y de la vida, ejemplo de una juventud idealista que se enfrenta al odio, la guerra y la oposición social; dispuesta a luchar por sus convicciones políticas y vitales. Además la edición publicada por Libros del Asteroide viene con unas fotografías de los protagonistas de la obra y sus familiares en las páginas finales. Después de leer el libro es imposible no contemplarlas con un pequeño nudo en el estómago, siendo plenamente conscientes de las existencias azorosas y brillantes que todos ellos llevaron. Si hay algo que no se puede decir de Jessica, Esmond y el resto de las hermanas Mitford es que no se contentaron con lo que tenían, fueron estrellas que refulgieron hasta su extinción.

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Wigs on the Green is still a satire of Nancy’s social set, but since that social set had come to include avowed Nazis and avowed communists, so does the novel: It skewers Diana’s courtship with the fascist Mosley, and Unity’s budding fascism. (Diana eventually forgave Nancy for the book, but Unity never did.) By the time she released Pigeon Pie in 1940, Nancy was writing light social satire about the war. The heroine of Pigeon Pie is an English aristocrat who transforms herself into a Beautiful Female Spy to fight the fascists. Se nota mucho que la autora es periodista. Es una escritora increíblemente económica en cuanto a medios de expresarse, su estilo es claro, directo y conciso, no se permite nunca divagar o irse por las ramas. Al igual que con su hermana mayor encontramos una lectura sazonada de comentarios irónicos sobre el mundo en el que vivió y las personas que la rodeaban. Pero en el caso de Jessica la sátira es mucho más directa y concisa, menos elegante, no se anda con por las ramas a la hora de decir lo que piensa ni se esconde tras situaciones tan frívolas que pueden resultar absurdas o con personajes a los que es imposible tomar en serio, pero que esconden una carga histórica y social mucho más profunda de lo que puede parecer a simple vista. Como buena periodista hace una crónica nítida, detallada e inteligente de un mundo que está desapareciendo, de una sociedad cambiante por el contexto histórico y político, una acertada comparativa de dos sociedades; la estadounidense y la inglesa. Es sincera cuando la mayor parte del tiempo, y parcial el resto, en muchas ocasiones uno tiene la impresión de que lo que cuenta está ligeramente retocado para que parezca más interesante o lustroso. Pero incluso cuando camufla la verdad, está sigue visualizándose en el fondo de todo. Como puede verse en que muchos de sus comentarios y apreciaciones tienen un tinte frívolo y elitista, que demuestra que Jessica no pudo escapar del todo del tipo de vida y educación que había recibido en su casa. He incluso da la impresión de que ha llegado a un punto en su vida en que tampoco lo intenta. But it was because of Nancy, Jessica would eventually conclude, that the English public became fascinated with the Mitfords, reaching its peak in the 1970s but arguably continuing today. ( The last big Mitford biography came out in 2016.) “It was, of course, Nancy who started it all,” Jessica writes in her 1981 foreword to The Pursuit of Love. “Without her, there would be no Mitford industry. If only she could have lived to see the unlikely fruits of her early endeavors. ‘ How I shrieked,’ she would have said.” Unfortunately the book stops too soon. It covers her privileged, aristocratic childhood, elopement with her second cousin Esmond Romilly, both only 19 years old and off to the Spanish Civil War. It concludes with the outbreak of the Second World War when Esmond leaves for Canada and Airforce Training Camp. She is pregnant for the second time. We are summarily told of Esmond’s tragic death which will soon follow in 1941. That fund turns out not to be as whimsical as it sounds. Very young, she rushes off to the Spanish Civil War. For those who think the Mitfords were rich gentry who never stepped down from their thrones to put their money where their mouths were (to mix metaphors) – Hons and Rebels is an education. We are many miles from the Cotswolds as we see the intrepid Decca follow her cousin Esmond Romilly to Spain, facing hardship, opposition, and – yes – romance. It shows the extraordinary person Decca was, for better or worse.More than an extremely amusing autobiography…she has evoked a whole generation. Her book is full of the music of time.”

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford | Goodreads

So Jessica tells us the tale of someone born into privilege, luxury, and uselessness, who finds all of these qualities completely intolerable and who cannot, cannot, cannot endure the idea of the life that is laid out before her. She doesn't know what she believes, but she's sure it's not what her family believes.However, I recently read the collection of letters between the 6 sisters and gained more respect for Decca. Diana was arrested, in part, because of Nancy, who informed on her Nazi sisters to the British authorities. “She is a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and admirer of Hitler and sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy in general,” Nancy told MI5 of Diana. Nancy also warned authorities of her sister Pamela, whom Nancy said was a virulent anti-Semite. Pamela and her husband, Nancy wrote, “had been heard to declare a) that all Jews in England should be killed and b) that the war should be stopped now ‘before we lose any more money.’” Jessica Mitford's dashing and dramatic life story is almost too good to be true from a biography standpoint--and she's so utterly appealing that I think I have a bit of crush on her. Aristocratic and hilariously eccentric upbringing, one of the famous/infamous Mitford sisters (their number including a noted writer in Nancy, not one but TWO Nazis, and a communist--that's Jessica), elopement with her dreamy second cousin and their travels to go fight in the Spanish Civil War, emmigrating to America on next to no money, romantic slumming around the USA...you really could not make a lot of this stuff up. This is a very romantic book; the relationship between Esmund and her, especially their time on the road in America, is so sweetly portrayed. I really enjoyed seeing pre-war America through their eyes. Also, there is some lovely writing about the importance that books can have on the interior life of bookish children that had me nodding my head in agreement. Diana, too, was devoted to Nazism. She married Mosley in 1936 in Joseph Goebbels’s living room, with Hitler a guest of honor. In 1940, after the war broke out, she was arrested for her ties to Hitler and would spend three years in prison, then remain under house arrest until the end of the war. When war comes it destroys everything, but Linda maintains no regrets. “Don’t pity me,” she tells her best friend and cousin, Fanny. “I’ve had eleven months of perfect and unalloyed happiness, very few people can say that, in the course of long long lives, I imagine.”

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford | Goodreads Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford | Goodreads

Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL19641626M Openlibrary_edition Occasionally Unity and I joined in the forbidden sport of ‘teasing Debo’. The teasing had to be done well out of earshot of my father, as Debo was his prime favourite, and fearful consequences could follow if we made her cry. She was an extraordinarily softhearted child, and it was easy to make her huge blue eyes brim with tears – known as ‘welling’ in family circles. Unity invented a tragic story involving a Pekingese puppy. ‘The telephone bell rang,’ it went. ‘Grandpa got up from his seat and went to answer it. “Lill ill!” he cried . . .’ Lill was on her deathbed, a victim of consumption. Her dying request was that Grandpa should care for her poor little Pekingese. However, in all the excitement of the funeral, the Peke was forgotten, and was found several days later beside his mistress’s grave, dead of starvation and a broken heart. So instead of centering their drawing room conversations on historical irrelevancies, as they might have assumed would be their duty as minor society figures of no particular wealth or status, they were centering those conversations on the figures who would shape European and American politics throughout the wars and beyond. They were in the middle of a deadly serious conflict that would kill millions, including their own loved ones, and, ultimately, tear the family into pieces. Yet even in the midst of the reality of the war, the sisters’ letters and Jessica’s memoirs and Nancy’s novels continue to sparkle, to shine, to charm.

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We [...] were informed to our surprise that even in the middle of a civil war people under the age of [21] could not get married without their parents' consent. Some anarchists we met in a café offered the services of a priest they had taken prisoner ("We could find ways of making him do it," they said), but it would have meant a two-day journey and we weren't sure just how legal such a marriage would prove to be.