Welcome to the second installment of Mitfordiana, the email newsletter about Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca, Debo, and me. My commenting policy can be found here.
So, you know how, sometimes, you read a book that on the face of it is really promising and then it’s literally so bad you make yourself read the entire thing in order to stay up until 2am plotting about the scathing review you’re going to drop on your nonexistent Substack newsletter and when you get up in the morning to go to your manuscripts history class you’re so tired you forget to put in any earrings? And also you do this every night for a week straight? And then eventually, even when you do the thing and start the newsletter (friends, it is this very newsletter!), you start wondering if it’s literally even worth it to take apart a book that was so obviously written and published to capitalize on the ~scandal~ of the Mitfords and also perhaps the Christmas book buying season? Anyone else?
I know I’m being coy and I promise I’ll tell you what book I’m bitching about in a second, but let’s start with a little thought experiment: suppose you learn about the Mitford sisters for the first time and for whatever reason, you don’t find their tragedies, like, tragic enough, and so you choose to start “connecting the dots” on Unity and you marvel at her having met Hitler 140 times between 1935 and 1939, and then you somehow land a book deal??? What would YOU say about all that in this book? How would you start it?
Would you include a protracted reflection on the “dangerous inflection point” of contemporary American politics in the year of our lord 2020? Would you then discuss the “implicit parallels” to 1930s England? Would you then argue that the “classification and reclassification” of government files over the long twentieth century shows that the British aristocracy of that decade was complicit in the fall of democracy? Despite the fact that, uh, democracy did not fall?
This is how Lauren Young’s book Hitler’s Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII (Harper Collins, 2022) begins. The selling point, according to the jacket copy, is supposed to be that Young made use of “recently declassified intelligence files” to show how the British upper classes sympathized with, and supported, the Nazi rise to power, thereby presenting an “alternative history” of the period.
That’s all fine and good, except we’ve known that they did this for decades? The Duke of Windsor’s visit to Hitler’s retreat in Berghof in 1937 literally made international headlines? Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is one of the best novels ever written? There is a ton of post-WWII scholarship on this? It is extremely well-known to anybody who even glances at British culture between, oh, 1920 and 1939 that the aristocracy was antisemitic, racist, and predisposed to support Hitler.
Sure, the details of some of it are still up for debate, but also, I went through some of Young’s citations to papers at the National Archives in Kew, and from I’m seeing online, the vast majority of the files she cites have been publicly available since, uh, 1988 (or earlier). Perhaps if Young had made novel use of any of these government files, I would have more positive things to say, but given that she obscures her sources in the text (all citations are given as endnotes), consistently gets major and well-established facts wrong (the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938, not 1937; prior to 1914, the Windsors were known as the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, not the Battenbergs), and ends with the “suggestion” that Unity was Hitler’s lover and gave birth to his child (she did not), I struggle to find anything redeeming. Some of these are basic things that a fact-checker or proofreader ought to have caught, yet it seems that nobody did fact-check or proofread this book. The reviewers over at Goodreads are far more nitpicky about these issues than I care to be, so please see their thoughts on hastily-written nonfiction for more.
Young is a lecturer in political science at Yale, and from what I can find, has a background in contemporary security and defense issues, though also, weirdly, an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art? Now, everyone should feel free to study and/or write books on whatever they want, but (and this is just me) I would not establish myself as a nuclear non-proliferation expert, land a job at Yale, advise the US government on cybersecurity, and then publish my first book on… the Mitfords. I don’t blame someone with an interest for wanting to learn more about the Mitfords— that’s why I’ve got this newsletter and I hope that’s why you’re all here (tell your friends to subscribe!). But I have many questions about how an unestablished author without a public track record of 20th century social history scholarship lands a book deal with an executive editor at HarperCollins, and it is that sort of shadiness which characterizes Hitler’s Girl.
Ultimately, this book is a prime example of the ways the Mitford Industry misuses the very real, very interesting, very tragic parts of the sisters’ lives to make grandiose proclamations about “our world today” in a way that does a real disservice to anybody trying to actually understand social and political history. There are plenty of archival sources relating to the Mitfords that have yet to be thoroughly studied, but just as many are very well-known if you do even a smidgen of research. Even if you can’t get to the family papers at the Chatsworth archives or track down a copy of David Pryce-Jones’s book on Unity, Young’s continual suggestions that Unity’s story was intentionally hidden by Debo rings hugely false in the face of Debo’s excellent memoirs and Charlotte Mosley’s letter collections, all things which have been easily accessible for ages and make for delightful bedtime reading besides.
If one wants to write a scandal-mongering tale of Hitler’s stalker (sorry, Unity, that’s what you were) and the resulting love affair, then I question your judgment and taste, but by all means go for it (and maybe keep it on your hard drive). If you want to take to the pages of the Times or the Guardian to warn about fascist tendencies in contemporary America, please do. But for the love of God, don’t hastily write and sell a non-fiction book that purports to be a thoughtful look at British aristocratic fascism but is actually just another “what if” about the sisters.
In tearing haste,
Diana