When I grabbed Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels from the shelf for #NYRBWomen24, I had no idea it was a memoir. My knowledge of the Mitford Sisters was pretty much surface-level: Nancy, the oldest, was a successful novelist, and I like her biographies (also published by NYRB Classics); one of the younger sisters scandalized the conservative family by becoming enamored by socialism while another scandalized the country by becoming enamored by fascism and, indeed, friends with Hitler.

Intrigued, I nevertheless did nothing to deepen my knowledge of this family. I was excited when at the end of the second paragraph I realized that Hons and Rebels was about Jessica Mitford’s own life, when she writes, after describing some two pieces of art in her childhood home at Swinbrook: “one a golden-haired, delicate young lady with luminous blue eyes, her soft white shoulders draped in a pre-Raphaelite something, the other a roguishly pretty gypsy maiden whose incredible thick black hair falls in great round curls. As a child, I always thought them amazingly like Nancy and Diana, my older sisters.”

I would soon learn that Jessica Mitford was the sister who, as a child, became “first a convinced pacifist, then quickly graduating to socialist ideas.” I would loosely divide the case into two halves, the first half going over Jessica’s youth seeking to get out of Swinbrook’s stifling conservatism and the second half going through her eventual escape.

I thought the whole thing was excellent and got genuinely emotionally involved. I was captivated by Mitford’s desires to do something, though she was so young, in the war in Span, by her attraction to her distant cousin — and Winston Churchill’s nephew — Esmond Romilly, by their eventual marriage, by their self-imposed exile to America, and their dread as World War II started to ramp up, something that was terrifying for so many reason, including a very personal one for Jessica, re-emphasized when she’d read about her sister in Nazi circles.

Mitford has some fascinating thoughts for her sister, the one she says she loved best. For example:

She was always a terrific hater — so were all of us except possibly Tom — but I had always thought she hated intelligently, and admired her ability to reduce the more unpleasant of the grown-up relations to a state of acute nervous discomfort with one of her smoldering looks of loathing. But when she wrote gaily off to Der Stürmer, “I want everybody to know I am a Jew-hater,” I felt she had forgotten the whole point of hating, and had once and for all put herself on the side of the hateful.

Ultimately, Hons and Rebels does not go into this as much as I would have liked (the book, once war is declared, winds quickly to a close), though it’s completely understandable why it doesn’t. The book is about the pre-war years, and I’m certain that the war years were not something Mitford felt any desire to write much about in this volume.

Once again, three cheers to the #NYRBWomen24 project and to Kim McNeil for putting it together. I’m not sure when I would have read this otherwise, and I have been, once again, enriched.