Words Between Wayward AristocratsBy MARTIN RUBINWall Street JournalDecember 7, 2007; Page W6THE MITFORDSEdited by Charlotte Mosley(Harper, 834 pages, $39.95)Near the end of Nancy Mitford’s novel “The Pursuit of Love” (1945) comes a delicious Mitford moment when two young aristocrats, in an English country house, await the expected German invasion in the summer of 1940. One of them bursts in on the other.”‘You’ll never guess,’ she said, ‘in a thousand thousand years who has arrived.'”‘Hitler,’ I said stupidly.”In real life, the remark would not have been fanciful or stupid. For if there was any family with members who might have welcomed the Fuehrer to England, it was the Mitfords, the 20th-century expression of an ancient line going as far back as Saxon times. The family’s barony was comparatively recent, though, conferred by Edward VII in 1902. The Mitfords had no big familial estate. But they did possess an enormous talent for eccentricity, if such a tame word can possibly encompass the six sisters whose letters Charlotte Mosley has brought together in “The Mitfords.”…Enjoy the full review here.
