Top

We have updated our Privacy Policy Please take a moment to review it. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy.

The Mitford Girls

On sale

4th September 2008

Price: £14.99

Select a format

Selected: ebook / ISBN-13: 9780748109210

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

‘A sensational saga’ Mail on Sunday

‘A cracking read’
Lynn Barber, Observer

‘Engrossing from beginning to end’ Vogue

‘Fascinating, the way all great family stories are fascinating’ New York Times Book Review

Even if the six daughters, born between 1904 and 1920, of the charming, eccentric David, Lord Redesdale and his wife Sydney had been quite ordinary women, the span of their lives – encompassing the most traumatic century in Britain’s history – and the status to which they were born, would have made their story a fascinating one. But Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Decca and Debo, ‘the mad, mad Mitfords’, were far from ordinary.

What's Inside

Read More Read Less

Reviews

Daily Mail
Lovell's never-a-dull moment biography animates usually underrated players such as the girls' mother, Lady Redesdale, who once lectured Hitler on the importance of wholemeal bread, and Pam, the second eldest and 'most rural' Mitford Girl, who had a sky-blue Aga to match her eyes
Mail on Sunday
A sensational saga
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
A dazzling cast of characters... A rivetingly intimate history lesson
A.N. Wilson, New Statesman
A book that can be heartily recommended
Lynn Barber, Observer
I enjoyed The Mitford Girls enormously... Lovell has had access to material which was not previously available... she paints a somewhat more human, in fact more tragic, picture of the Mitfords than previous biographers
Robert Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review
Fascinating, the way all great family stories are fascinating
Daily Telegraph
This is an excellent book - calm, dispassionate and respectful of its subjects
Sunday Times
In the first book devoted to the whole tribe, Lovell does sterling work in revising our Nancy-made image of her parents in her novel The Pursuit of Love
Independent on Sunday
The remarkable Mitfords have inspired dozens of books but this may well be the best... Enjoyably anecdotal, it is engagingly written while displaying a rare and commendable restraint
Houston Chronicle
Vivid social history that reads like a novel... An impressive group biography
Independent
By drawing on new sources, Lovell presents a fresh version of the Mitford story... Lovell's book proves that there was something extraordinary about those six well-bred girls from Gloucestershire
Vogue
These women were so powerfully, inescapably, passionately alive... The book remains engrossing from beginning to end
Publishers Weekly
Rises with aplomb to the challenges of a group biography, deftly weaving together the narrative threads of six at times radically disparate lives, to create a fascinating account of a fascinating family
Miami Herald
They were quite a handful these sisters. But they were always great fun. And so is Lovell's rollicking book
Daily Express
The whole story is brought together, expertly and entertainingly, by Mary S. Lovell... as a curtain raiser, both of the Mitford Girls and those bright young things around them, it is second to none