Decca

The Letters of Jessica Mitford

De: Jessica Mitford, Peter Y. Sussman

The letters of the most remarkable of the Mitford sisters—timed to a new streaming series about the ever-fascinating family and a new biography of Jessica coming in 2025.

Born into the British aristocracy as one of the famous (and sometimes infamous) larger-than-life Mitford sisters, Jessica "Decca" Mitford ran away to Spain during the Spanish Civil War with her cousin Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew, then came to America, became a tireless political activist and a member of the Communist Party, and embarked on a brilliant career as a memoirist and muckraking journalist (her funeral-industry exposé, The American Way of Death, became an instant classic). She was a celebrated wit, a charmer, and throughout her life a prolific and passionate writer of letters—now gathered here.

Decca’s correspondence crackles with irreverent humor and mischief, and with acute insight into human behavior (and misbehavior) that attests to her generous experience of the worlds of politics, the arts, journalism, publishing, and high and low society. Here is correspondence with everyone from Katharine Graham, Betty Friedan, Miss Manners, Julie Andrews, Maya Angelou, Harry Truman, and Hillary Rodham Clinton to Decca’s sisters the Duchess of Devonshire and the novelist Nancy Mitford, her parents, her husbands, her children, and her grandchildren.

©2006 Jessica Mitford (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Decca, a collection of [Jessica Mitford’s] letters that spans sixty years, is not only a portrait of an intrepid, humorous and affectionate woman, but a look at class and politics through the eyes of someone to whom good writing mattered and intimacy mattered even more . . . . [It] is impossible not to reach the end [of this collection of letters] without great admiration–for a life so generously and humorously led, in which injustices and causes really mattered, and in which happiness, love and friendship played such an enormous part.”–Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“These letters are rarely less than amusing, colored by salubrious scorn for the pieties and deceit of the status quo and marked by Decca’s gimlet eye for the maliciously telling detail . . . [It’s] impossible not to be drawn in by Decca’s spiky charm and disarming curiosity, which remained with her to the end . . .”–Daphne Merkin, Slate magazine

“Decca is a wonderfully rich and varied collection [of letters]. Far better than [Jessica Mitford’s autobiography], Hons and Rebels, it brings together the extremes of her two worlds: the English aristocracy of her birth and postwar American radical politics. Conflict and displacement, strong family affections and an even stronger urge to rebel against her class and upbringing are recurring themes . . . The mixture of the personal and political enlivens the Mitford letters, especially those between the sisters . . . [On] the whole, the comic spirit prevails in this large, well-edited and generous volume of her letters.”–Brenda Niall, The Age