The Mitford sisters’ father had hoped they would marry respectable men—“the chinless horrors,” as his daughters called them.

Deborah, seen here in 1938, became the Duchess of Devonshire.

From left: Jessica, Nancy, Diana, Unity, and Pamela in 1935. (The youngest sister, Deborah, is not pictured.)

Unity, Diana, and Nancy in an undated photo.

Diana with Bryan Guinness, on their wedding day, 1929.

Politically, the Mitford sisters ran the gamut from Fascism to Communism.

Unity, an ardent Nazi, attempted suicide after Britain declared war on Germany.

Jessica later became a muckraking journalist, best known for her exposé of the funeral industry.

Nancy and Jessica both became best-selling writers.

Nancy, seen here in 1931, occasionally modeled characters in her novels after her sisters.

Diana was “the most hated woman in England.”

*Top,* Diana and her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, under house arrest in 1943; *above,* Unity with Adolf Hitler, 1936.

Diana spent the early years of World War II interned in Holloway Prison.

Still More Mitford-Mania

Mimi Pond has written and illustrated a graphic novel about her own lifelong fascination with the infamous sisters

By Ben Schwartz

When the six Mitford sisters—Nancy, Pamela, Jessica, Diana, Unity, and Deborah—born between 1904 and 1920, left their family’s isolated estate in Oxfordshire and went out into the world, they ended up hobnobbing with Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill (their cousin), two generations of Kennedys, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Queen Elizabeth II. Politically, they ran the gamut from Fascist to Communist, and the youngest became the Duchess of Devonshire. Nancy, the novelist, and Jessica, the muckraking journalist, became best-selling authors.

The Mitfords cut a large swath through the 20th century, influencing it and millions of people, for better or worse. One of those is cartoonist Mimi Pond, whose latest graphic novel is Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me. It’s her third work of nonfiction comics, after her PEN-award-winning Over Easy and The Customer Is Always Wrong.