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Concept
Jessica Mitford
Summary
Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft (née Freeman-Mitford, later Romilly; 11 September 1917 – 23 July 1996) was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics.
Jessica married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, who was killed in World War II, and then American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, with whom she joined the Communist Party USA and worked closely in the Civil Rights Congress. Both refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They resigned from the party in 1958.
Her 1960 memoir Hons and Rebels and her 1963 book of social commentary The American Way of Death both became classics.
Born at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, the sixth of seven children, Jessica Mitford was the daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney (daughter of politician and publisher Thomas Bowles), and grew up in a series of her father's country houses. She had little formal education, but nevertheless did a great deal of reading. Her sisters Unity and Diana were well-known members of the British Union of Fascists and ultimately became close friends of Adolf Hitler, Unity becoming fanatically devoted to him. Diana married the British Union of Fascists' leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. Upon the outbreak of war between the UK and Nazi Germany, Unity tried to commit suicide in Munich, and Diana and her husband were interned in Britain without trial from May 1940 until November 1943.
Jessica (known as "Decca" to family and friends) later described her conservative father as "one of nature's fascists", renounced her privileged background while still a teenager, and became an adherent of communism. Mitford said that her parents had "appeased Hitler and Nazism. ... He had crushed the trade unions, he had crushed the Communist Party and he had crushed the Jews ... and don't forget there's a huge strain of anti-Semitism that runs through that class in England." She was known as the "red sheep" of the family.
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