Her young life does have to be read about to be believed. I suppose that most people who are interested in reading this book, which is in print as part of the New York Review of Books Classics series, know about the Mitford sisters, who included one Communist (Jessica), two fascists (one of whose weddings included Josef Goebbels as best man), and a duchess, among others and they may know the author as being most famous as a journalist who exposed the excesses of the American funeral industry in The American Way of Death. There is an over-the-top element to almost every page of this true story that contrasts well with Mitford’s dry style. It’s one mark of a good writer that you can form your own reaction to characters that the writer is less than objective about. I found I liked Mitford very much, even if I liked the first great love of her life, the young Esmond Romilly (Winston Churchill’s nephew), and her parents, less than she herself did. Mitford was a Communist by choice, but an Englishwoman by birth, and the characteristically English skill of understatement is far more in evidence. Never fear, though, no cliché-ridden denunciations or screeds are to be found. This is a very incisive and surprisingly skillful memoir of a very unusual upper-class childhood in England, partly because Jessica Mitford is the kind of author who can write with great power while seeming to write almost offhandedly, and partly because Mitford, who in young adulthood became a committed Communist, is more inclined than most to be frank about the English class system. The ensuing scandal, in which a British destroyer was dispatched to recover the two truants, inspires some of Mitford's funniest, and most pointed, pages.' 'A family portrait, a tale of youthful folly and high-spirited adventure, a study in social history, a love story, Hons and Rebels is a contribution to the autobiographer's art.'-BOOK JACKET. Mitford found her family's world as smothering as it was singular and, determined to escape it, she eloped with Esmond Romilly, Churchill's nephew, to go fight in the Spanish Civil Wr.

Jessica swung left and moved to America, where she took part in the civil rights movement and wrote her classic expose of the undertaking business, The American Way of Death.' 'Hons and Rebels is the tale of Mitford's upbringing. Her sisters included Nancy, doyenne of the 1920s London smart set and a noted novelist and biographer Diana, wife to the English fascist chief Sir Oswald Mosley Unity, who fell head over heels in love with Hitler and Deborah, later the Duchess of Devonshire. 'Jessica Mitford, the great muckraking journalist, was part of a legendary English aristocratic family.

Hons and rebels review