This is where Hons and Rebels ends. Decca reveals nothing about the subsequent weeks and months, about joining her husband in Toronto, his transfer to England in August 1941, or his death only three months later, shot down during a bombing raid over Hamburg. It was not until nearly twenty years later that her remarkable memoir was published, by which time she had long been settled in California, had remarried and become the mother of two more children, as well as a famously fanatical crusader against right-wing movements and what she regarded as the corruption and injustices of the American way of life. Nancy Mitford in her Paris apartment, 1956. Thurston Hopkins/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Hons and Rebels – New York Review Books

The audiobook I listened to is narrated by Jenny Agutter. It is based on the book’s 1989 edition which restores that which had been removed from the original 1960 edition. The narration is excellent. I adored the different inflections used for Americans and Brits. Publicado en 1960, “Nobles y Rebeldes” , es la biografía de Jessica Mitford, quinta de las seis hijas de una familia de la aristocracia inglesa, las cuales han pasado a la historia por sus complejas y escandalosas vidas sentimentales y políticas. Los nombres de las mayorías de ellas se relacionan con el fascismo, siendo Jessica la excepción, pues ella militó en el Partido Comunista y no dudo en escaparse de su casa para acudir a la Guerra Civil Española con quien poco después sería su esposo, Esmond Romilly, sobrino del mismísimo Winston Churchill. La biografía puede dividirse en tres partes: en la primera Jessica nos habla de cómo era su vida familiar y de sus relaciones con sus padres y sus hermanos, hablando también sobre que pasaba en las existencias de la mayoría de sus hermanas. En esta primera parte conocemos como empezaron las inquietudes políticas y sociales de Jessica, como su vida de niña bien en la campiña inglesa termino por resultarle tediosa y aburrida, sintiendo la necesidad de hacer algo más con su vida. En la segunda parte, el foco se centrará más en la Guerra Civil española y lo que Jessica y Esmond vivieron en el frente vasco, además del escándalo que supuso su fuga y los intentos del gobierno inglés y sus familias por hacerles regresar a su patria. La última parte se centrará en la vida de la pareja como casados, hablando de sus problemas económicos en Inglaterra y de su posterior periplo por los Estados Unidos. La biografía terminará con la partida de Esmond al frente para luchar en la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

We [...] were informed to our surprise that even in the middle of a civil war people under the age of [21] could not get married without their parents' consent. Some anarchists we met in a café offered the services of a priest they had taken prisoner ("We could find ways of making him do it," they said), but it would have meant a two-day journey and we weren't sure just how legal such a marriage would prove to be. The past decade of political polarization shows no sign of abating, and it continues to turn not just countries but families against each other. Once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters are becoming once-a-decade disasters in the wake of catastrophic climate change. The world is fundamentally reorganizing itself before our eyes, and in such a destabilizing moment, there is something useful in looking at a family who found its world, too, shifting and changing in ways none of them could have predicted. And who exemplifies that situation better than the Mitfords? But the new Pursuit of Love does provide us with an opportunity to consider what remains valuable about The Pursuit of Love — and, by extension, what is valuable about the history of the Mitfords altogether. That’s the sensibility that breathes through their best work: a sense of joy and play that continues through brutal, bloody moments of history. Los acontecimientos que hacen historia suelen parecer interminables cuando uno los está viviendo. Solo al cabo de los años se tiene la perspectiva suficiente para ver lo esencial, reducido ya a expresiones telescópicas y simplistas para los libros de historia […] En la vida real, el desarrollo de una crisis que conduce a un cambio de gobierno, el curso de negociaciones y conferencias internacionales que conforman el destino de una generación o el flujo y reflujo de las batallas que deciden el resultado de una guerra se desarrollan con exasperante parsimonia, como a cámara lenta, y el significado decisivo de cada etapa a menudo termi na enterrado bajo ríos de tinta y montañas de especulaciones, rumores, interpretaciones, relatos «inspirados», comentarios a favor y en contra.”

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford – Stuck in a Book Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford – Stuck in a Book

urn:lcp:honsrebels00mitf:epub:61ebb1c0-2073-47e1-a8ae-73dc23de362a Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier honsrebels00mitf Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7tn18406 Invoice 1213 Isbn 9780575400047Tom, our only brother, occupied a rather special place in family life. We called him Tuddemy, partly because it was the Boudledidge translation of Tom, partly because we thought it rhymed with ‘adultery’. ‘Only one brother and six sisters! How you must love him. How spoilt he must be,’ strangers would say. ‘Love him! You mean loathe him,’ was the standard Honnish answer. Debo, asked by a census-taker what her fam­ily consisted of, replied furiously, ‘Three Giants, three Dwarfs and one Brute.’ The Giants were Nancy, Diana and Unity, all exceptionally tall; the Dwarfs Pam, Debo and me; the Brute, poor Tuddemy. My mother has to this day a cardboard badge on which is carefully lettered: ‘League against Tom. Head: Nancy.’