Were the Mitford sisters not real, even the producers of the new drama Outrageous might dismiss the characters as implausible. The series, which premieres on BritBox June 18, revolves around these six gorgeous, passionate, and defiant sisters at the cusp of World War II, whose social circles have them schmoozing with Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Oswald Mosley, Evelyn Waugh, and Cecil Beaton—and in later years, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, John F. Kennedy and Maya Angelou.
However incredible it sounds, it’s all true. Despite all being raised in the same upper-class Oxfordshire Jacobean manor, the half-dozen Mitford sisters grew in six drastically different directions. (One Mitford brother, their beloved Tom, died young.) Of the sisters, one became a Nazi, another a socialist. All but one married; all but one divorced. Most lived long lives, except the one who shot herself in the head. Somehow, against all odds, they remained (mostly) close for almost a century.
“The Six,” as they were known, “were never out of the papers—sort of the Kardashians of the era,” says biographer Mary S. Lovell, author of The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, the book on which the new show is based. Like the Kardashians, each is uniquely Mitfordian. As BritBox’s Outrageous premieres in America, here’s a quick crash course on which of the six real-life Mitford sisters is which—and why they’re still captivating us after all these years.
Nancy Mitford, the Writer
A.k.a. Lady, Nuance, Susan, Soo
Born in 1904, the eldest daughter of David Freeman-Mitford (called “Farve”) and Sydney Bowles (whom she called “Muv”) was spoiled and difficult, and would much have preferred to be an only child. At 10, Nancy’s paternal uncle died, suddenly leaving her father next in line to the Mitford family fortune—which wasn’t as life-changing it seemed. “There was lots of land and massive country estates, but no money,” explains Lovell.
So Nancy grew up a strange mix of rich and poor, both part of and not quite of her Downton Abbey–esque world. She rebelled accordingly, and by the Roaring Twenties, Nancy’s badly behaved circle of flapper friends were known by British tabloids as the “Bright Young Things.” Among them were Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh, who documented their debauchery as Nancy did: in gossip columns published in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
By 1930, the eldest Mitford sister was a professional writer, using her loosely disguised famous family as literary fodder. Not all her sisters approved of her candor. Nancy published work based on them just the same, most obviously in her bestseller, The Pursuit of Love. “Nancy made a living gently satirizing them all,” says biographer Laura Thompson, author of another book, The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters.
But Nancy was less successful in love. When her first engagement ended (that fiancé preferred men), she impulsively married Peter Rodd, an aimless philanderer. They soon separated and never had children, making Nancy the only (living) Mitford sister not to raise progeny of her own—and therefore a source of cruel pity from the others.
Writer friend James Lees-Milne described a “vein of callousness” in the Mitfords, but Nancy was the worst offender. “She could hurt people without even thinking,” says Lovell. Nancy doled out bullying nicknames like “Chunky,” for her sister Pam, and “Nine,” for her sister Deborah. (The moniker was inspired by Deborah’s supposed mental age.) Still, the ruthless elder sister proved imperative. “Nancy is the creator of the Mitford myth,” says Thompson. “How would we see the Mitfords without her? We might not.”
Pamela Mitford, the Countrywoman
A.k.a. Woman, Wooms, Chunky, the “Forgotten Sibling”
Poor Pamela, a child with polio that left one leg slightly shorter than the other, took the brunt of Nancy’s abuse and retreated almost immediately to dachshunds and ponies. “She was passive, which was very non-Mitford,” writes Thompson. Similarly un-Mitfordian, she eschewed publicity and preferred a private life in the country, thriving at all things domestic—from gardening vegetables to cooking pork to breeding Swiss chickens. For mastering the feminine arts, Pamela’s family nicknamed her “Woman.”
Her best skill, however, was caregiving. “Pamela was the emotional nurturer, always,” says Lovell, “and throughout all their traumas, the sisters went to Pam rather than Sydney, their mother.” The second sister (and replacement maternal figure) became her siblings’ go-to solution in dire situations. While Pamela suffered from infertility and never had biological children, she took her sister Diana’s children in and raised them with her husband, millionaire physicist Derek Jackson.
Rumours swirled that Pam had a marriage of convenience: Jackson was allegedly a bisexual womanizer, and she was a “you-know-what-bian” (at least according to little sister Jessica). The marriage ended 15 years later, and Pamela would become Jackson’s second wife of six. “By the end, Pamela went off to live with a woman—almost certainly her lover—to raise chickens in the country,” says Thompson. She died in 1994 after falling down steep stairs and breaking two bones in her bad leg.
Diana Mitford, the Goddess
A.k.a. Ice Queen, Honks, Corduroy, “the Most Hated Woman in England”
Nancy bullied Pam into submission, but she met her match in Diana. “They are the two powerhouses who massively influence the others,” says Thompson. “Nancy is light and scintillation; Diana is dark and radical.” Physically, that descriptor inverts: Diana was a striking beauty with porcelain skin, blonde hair, and cornflower blue eyes.
Diana was unanimously considered the most beautiful Mitford—a label that was no doubt significant in a family of sisters in this pre-feminist era. Even at 90, when Lovell met the most scandalous Mitford in person while researching her biography, Diana was “absolutely impossibly beautiful—more beautiful than she appears in photos even—with perfect bone structure.” While Nancy neared spinsterhood, Diana was promptly scooped up as society bride to a perfect match: Bryan Guinness, heir to the famous Irish brewing fortune, for whom she bore an heir and a spare within 18 months.
A happy ending for most was stifling for the restless Diana. In 1932, she met (and married) the handsome Sir Oswald Mosley, 14 years her senior and founder of the British Union of Fascists, and began a long-standing affair that left her divorced from Guinness and estranged from her family. Despite the other Mitfords’ stern disapproval, Diana married Oswald in secret in 1936; Adolf Hitler was the guest of honor.
Alongside her even more radical sister Unity, Diana was a great admirer of Hitler and the Nazis. Deemed a threat to national security, and described by MI5 as “far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband,” she was arrested and imprisoned in 1940. She remained unrepentant until her death in 2003. “She never apologized—none of them did,” says Thompson. Lovell never managed to reconcile Diana’s ideology with the lovely old lady she continued meeting for brunch whenever she visited Paris—even after the book was finished.
Unity Mitford, the Nazi
A.k.a. Boud, Bobo, Birdie
During one of Farve’s feeble search for gold, Unity Valkyrie Mitford was ominously conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario. Much to the others’ chagrin, Unity would become the only Mitford sister allowed any kind of formal education, and only because the teenager proved too difficult to manage at home. As of 1929, that was a new-build manor called Swinbrook House that all the Mitfords hated. (Its nickname? “Swinebrook.”)
Boarding school was supposed to help socialize Unity, who was odd by all accounts. At debutante balls, she’d wear her pet snake as a necklace or tuck a rat into her handbag. She ate only mashed potatoes for years and would slide under the dinner table to sulk, which her ever-protective family considered adorable quirks. “In hindsight, I think there was a serious undiagnosed mental health illness there,” says Thompson. Unpopular and disruptive at school, Unity was expelled twice before returning home.
Like everyone else, notes Thompson, “Unity was massively competitive with Diana.” Since Diana liked Hitler, Unity loved Hitler, moving to Munich in 1934 to stalk the führer. Ten months later, on what she described in her diary as “the most wonderful day of my life,” her efforts finally worked: Twenty-one-year-old Unity caught his 45-year-old eye with her Aryan good looks and was invited to join his inner circle. Eva Braun was deeply jealous of their relationship, and rumours persist to this day that Unity birthed Hitler’s love child in secret and gave the baby up for adoption.
“Everything she did was vile,” says Lovell, who through all her research found “almost no redeeming qualities about Unity.” Death was no exception: When Britain declared war on Germany, Unity shot herself in the head with a pearl-handled pistol gifted to her by Hitler. She survived, albeit with severe brain damage, until swelling around the bullet lodged in her brain caused her death by meningitis at the age of 33.
Jessica Mitford, The Communist
A.k.a. Decca, Boud, Squalor, the Red Sheep
Just as Nancy and Diana were bookends, so were Unity and Jessica. They called each other “Boud,” fluently spoke their own language called “Boudledidge,” and by choice shared a bedroom which they divided with chalk down the middle. Swastikas and Nazi propaganda decorated Unity’s side; Jessica’s had hammers and sickles and photos of Lenin.
Semi-affectionately called the family’s “red sheep,” Jessica saved every dollar she was ever given in her “running-away fund.” At 19, she eloped with her second cousin and ran off to join the Spanish Civil War. In order to deliberately experience poverty, they later moved to London’s East End slum and relinquished everything Mitford—undoubtably the most hurtful familial transgression she could muster. “Her disobedience was seismic and monumental,” says Thompson.
Jessica’s life was characterized by one tragedy after another: Her first child died of measles; her husband’s plane disappeared over Germany. Unity’s death devastated Jessica. Still, says Thompson, “she was the strongest of them all.” Jessica emigrated to America, married a civil rights lawyer, and had two sons. (Another tragedy: At 11, one was hit and killed by a bus.)
Like Nancy, Jessica became an author, and later a professor and investigative journalist. A prolific letter writer, she stayed in contact with all her sisters but Diana, from whom she was estranged, until Jessica’s death in 1996. Obituaries lauded her as a crusader for equality and social justice. “Jessica got an easier ride just by landing on the right side of history,” Thompson says. Still bitter, Diana didn’t attend her funeral.
Deborah Mitford, the Duchess
A.k.a. Debo, Nine, Stubby, the Last Mitford Girl
The youngest Mitford sister had an entirely different experience of childhood than the eldest. Perhaps her sisters’ never-ending dramas offered new priorities for Farve and Muv, whose hearts and rules softened in later years. The last remaining child at home, darling Deborah was (relatively) spoiled for love and affection. Unlike her other sisters, Debo was perfectly content not going to school, staying agreeably centrist and embracing conventional matrimony.
At 18, Deborah fell in love at first sight with Andrew Cavendish, the second (read: inheritance-less) son of the Duke of Devonshire. But just as David Mitford had come into his fortune, the death of Andrew’s brother in combat made the young couple the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Together they had seven children, four of whom survived. She spent her remaining years as chatelaine of the stately Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and, naturally, wrote her own memoir called Wait for Me!
The last Mitford daughter represented a shift from Old World aristocracy to modernity, which claims to abstain from the class politics that made the Mitfords famous to begin with. Deborah embodied this more than anyone, recalls Lovell. “I’d go for a walk with her, and she’d meet and talk to the gardener’s daughter the same way she’d talk to Prince William.” Never radical, Deborah and her husband joined the new Social Democratic Party in 1981.
Despite Nancy’s childhood taunts—she called her sister dumb—Deborah, like all Mitford girls, was intelligent, resilient, fiercely independent, and entirely unique. “They all make different choices, but they’ve all got this confidence in their choices,” says Thompson. No wonder whether you’re a Nancy or a Debo or a Diana, we all still strive to be a little bit Mitfordian.
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