Sunday 5 April 2015

Happy Easter | The Mitfords



I hope this Easter Sunday is treating you well. I was wishing for sunny holidays but didn't get my wish so yesterday I went to the library to borrow some books. I had just finished reading The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley (the daughter-in-law of one of the Mitfords, Diana Mosley), and wanted to borrow more books about these interesting characters, but the library was closed. So disappointing! I will just have to enjoy my magazines and eat chocolate.



Actually, I never intended to read the aforementioned book. I had gone to the library some weeks ago to borrow The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (Nancy was the oldest Mitford sister, who became a well-known author), but unfortunately they didn't have it. I was looking for something else when the librarian brought me the book with the letters between the sisters and told me she had found it in the storage room; perhaps I was interested? I immediately liked the cover but since the book was 830-pages long I thought I would only leaf through it. Of course I ended up reading it from the beginning to the end, sometimes unable to put it down.

I'm not going to bore you with a long account of the Mitford sisters but I guess we could label some of them as British socialites of the 20th century. The dynamics between them, as expressed in their letters, were interesting, and some of them led quite colourful lives. I hardly knew anything about them before I read the book and you should have seen me when I reached a point where one of them, Unity, is sitting in a restaurant with Adolf Hitler in Munich. I wasn't quite expecting a description of his personal charm in a letter, but it's there and quite a lot of it. She was obsessed with him and she tried to commit suicide when the war broke out in 1939, which is another (sad) story. Let me just say that this book certainly takes you to some extreme places! You only have to google the Mitfords to know more about them but I found short articles with photos on the BBC website and The Guardian.

Happy Easter!


A Persian cat was here


2 comments:

  1. Wonderful vase!

    http://beautyfollower.blogspot.gr

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, I love it. It looks slightly darker in these images than it actually is. It was so cloudy when I took them.

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