“The Mitford Affair” - Marie Benedict

 📝 The glamorous Mitford sisters were at one point considered leading members of the Bright Young Things. I can’t do justice to wild peculiarities of this aristocratic clan, so read below for a compact description of the sisters.

📝Marie Benedict has once again done her research with this novel. TMA explores the relationship between Nancy, Unity, and Diana with WWII raging, and Nancy must come to terms with the fact that two of her sisters are engaging in downright treason, and that she, Nancy, might be the only one able to put an end to Diana’s plot. This novel is chock full of actual, real history. As daft and dangerous as Unity is, it is Diana (the latter day Holocaust denier) that is the villain in this novel.

📝  Each chapter is told from the POV of Diana, Unity, or Nancy. But Nancy’s chapters are told in the first person, suggesting to the reader that it is her action and not the brazen behavior of the other two, that forms the real crux of this story. At its most elemental, TMA is about the limits of familial loyalty.

📝 The divisions within the Mitford family are absolutely bonkers. The Mitford matriarch is sympathetic toward fascism and N*zism mostly it seems for the status she perceives with close association to H*tler. The Mitford patriarch who fought at Ypres, falls under the sway of H*tler too until his plans to invade Great Britain are revealed; until that time he pushed hard for appeasement.

📝 TMA explores Unity’s pathetic obsession with H*tler and Diana’s calculating attempts to use her sister to cull favor with H*tler as a means of securing funding for her philandering love, the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosely. The threat of Diana and Moseley’s plans coming to fruition was very real. They intended to establish a German radio broadcast to overcome the BBC stranglehold as war on British soil became a very real possibility. This would have enabled Germans to communicate with Fifth Columnists directly and would sow and spread N*zi propaganda in an alarmingly effective manner.

📝 I read Nancy’s “Pigeon Pie” and “Christmas Pudding” - and I could definitely see the parallels with her real life in those novels. Nancy lampoons herself as Sophia the socialite, volunteering in the war efforts in “Pigeon Pie”.  Sophia eventually discovers a N*zi spy ring based out of her own mansion, using radio transmissions to spread propaganda. Having learned about Diana’s grand scheme, Nancy openly mocked it. “Pigeon Pie” was written during the murky time period of the so-called Phony War - where Great Britain had declared war on Germany, but the effects had yet to manifest for British citizens. With all the insight into the Mitfords’ lives, TMA gives us an idea of Nancy’s headspace when she wrote “Pigeon Pie”.

📝 I want to read “Highland Fling” and “Wigs on the Green”; the latter perhaps the most obvious nod to the real-life events in TMA. In “Wigs”, Eugenia Malmains is Unity, Captain Jack is Mosely, and Jasper is Nancy’s own alcoholic husband Peter. Nancy uses her own families rife political divisions as a microcosm of English society.

📝  Nancy did not want to outright attack her fascist-loving sister Diana, or her H*tler worshipping sister Unity, nor did she want to complain about her useless husband, so she uses her pen to take potshots at the whole lot of them, cleverly veiled as fiction.