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.
Pond grew up far from rural England, in suburban San Diego. It was the early 1960s, a time when teachers shrugged off scholarships for girls, and boyfriends assumed she would simply drop her ambitions and marry and have kids. Her first exposure to the Mitfordverse came at age 12, in 1968, when her mother brought home Jessica’s blockbuster exposé of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death. Over time, the idea that one family could contain so many possibilities for what women could do with their lives—inspiring role models and cautionary tales—became a lifeline to Pond as she figured out her own life.
Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Do Admit blends historical biography with the author’s own story, set against an epic backdrop—and Pond uses the whole tool kit of the comics medium to do it. Pond has written for The Simpsons and Pee-wee’s Playhouse, so it’s not surprising that she is able to deftly shift from 1920s screwball comedy to 1930s political upheaval in the streets of London, to sight gags (one husband transforms into a skunk), to Unity’s gossipy teas with Hitler, to Jessica’s American HUAC hearings and Deborah’s late-night swim with J.F.K. in the White House pool.
The Mitfords’ father, Lord Redesdale, insisted his girls be raised in rural isolation. That way, he believed, he could keep them from “meeting the wrong set” and “developing thick calves.” He had hoped they would marry respectable men—“the chinless horrors,” as his daughters called them. To his chagrin, and Pond’s eternal gratitude, they did anything but.
Nancy emerged as one of the Bright Young Things of 1920s literary London. Jessica ran away to the Spanish Civil War. Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. She spent the early years of World War II as “the most hated woman in England,” interned in London’s dank Holloway Prison in her fur coat. One daughter, at least, came through for Lord Redesdale: Deborah “Debo” Mitford became the Duchess of Devonshire and lived until 2014. Her funeral was attended by Prince Charles.
Pond charts the Mitfords’ paths throughout the 20th century, offering her own wry and endlessly inventive visual takes on their lives. For its author, Do Admit represents a lifetime of fascination and six years at the drawing board. “Had I been told that women were and are to history as important as men are,” she writes now, “I would have made this book a lot sooner.”
As to the question of J.F.K. and the respectable Deborah in the White House pool, Pond adds, “We can wonder what was going on under the surface…. If anyone thinks the immaculate Debo incapable of this … I like to think she went for it.”
Ben Schwartz is an Emmy-nominated writer who has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Nation
