Consider the British families that are pillars of the publishing industry. The Windsors and the Churchills take top honors, but don’t overlook another contender: the Mitfords, six sisters raised in aristocratic obscurity between the wars. For decades, their extraordinary lives, ranging from the hilarious to the tragic, have been fodder for histories, collected letters, stage plays, films, and television shows, right up to this summer’s Netflix series Outrageous. Three of the sisters—novelist Nancy, Fascist Diana, and Nazi Unity—inspired biographies years ago. Now Carla Kaplan brings us Troublemaker, the first biography of Jessica, the runaway Mitford who decamped to America, joined the Communist Party, and became a successful author, named by Time magazine as “Queen of the Muckrakers.”
Born in 1917, the fifth of the sextet, Jessica was always known by her childhood nickname, “Decca.” Raised in rural privilege but deeply moved by rural poverty, she decided early to escape her insular world of servants, sisters, and peculiar parents, opening a “Running Away” account at the bank when she was 11. She made good on her plan at 19, running away to the Spanish Civil War with her second cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill’s. They married and eventually left Spain for a working-class neighborhood of London, where they had a baby daughter. Julia Romilly died at three months in a measles outbreak.
