read 2023

Unbelievable but 834 pages of letters and not one boring page. Remarkable women. ( )

This book gave a very interesting insight to the sisters and how they felt about each other. A little daunting reading 800 pgs of letters but by the end it wet my appetite for more about the Mitford Sisters. ( )

Letters between six sisters, spanning over 70 years, would be interesting enough.... but the fact these are the Mitford girls make them even more so. Charlotte Mosley's "The Mitfords: Letters between six sisters" is just plain fascinating.

I read Nancy Mitford's "Love in a Cold Climate" & "The Pursuit of Happiness" a couple of years ago and somewhere along the way learned that the characters were based on her aristocratic family. And what a family it was, producing such a myriad of characters -- an author, two fascists, a farmer, a communist and a duchess.

Their correspondence is most interesting during the World War II era, but at times it get a bit hard to read, given their galling political opinions. The letters really show you how the sisters grew and often mellowed in their senior years.

It took a long while to get through this book, but I'm glad I decided to pick it up. ( )

I found this book fascinating. Stretching over a span of more than seventy years, meeting and knowing some of the most illustrious (and notorious) people in the world, from Winston Churchill, the Kennedy family, and numerous authors to the tops of nazi-Germany, from a perspective that I can only discribe as extremely privilaged, but at the same time NOT leading to happiness- this correspondece is bound to be interesting just from the context of when and where the sisters lived, and whom they knew. Their choices however make their lifes even more extraordinary and the fact that all of them (bar one) are published authors makes the read even more enjoyable. I did not know everything and everyone that featured in the correspondence, but thankfully we have internet and I used Google and Wikipedia a lot in order to get a better insight. Since the letters were edited by the daughter in law of Diana, one of the sisters famed for her not so kosher political convictions, I also cannot but wonder how much there must have been that was NOT included in the book.
Still, the family relationships, diversity of choices, political opinions and destinies alone make this book an excellent read. ( )