Customer Reviews
Sisters who were different - By: C. Hudson, 08 Nov 2008 
This book was eminently readable. The differences & similarities between the six sisters, & their parents is well described with supporting letters, news clips, & interviews. The author keeps it pacey & interesting throughout, & rarely repeats herself; quite an achievementin such a long book. I was left with questions about each individual sister, which will need to be followed upin books on their personal lives, but this was a good starting point. Strange how charismatic yet unloveable they all seemed. Maybe the individuality of each prevented that bonding one would expectin a family that was educated at home, without much outside influence. I would recommend the book to anyone who is curious about this influential family.
Needs more depth - By: Tyke, 06 Sep 2008 
Although fairly readable & enjoyable, this book is a rather sketchy overview of the Mitfords. As a result, it's difficult for the reader to share the uncritical enthusiasm toward the subjects which Lovell tries, at times too hard, to convey. It will probably serve as an introduction to the Mitfords, but is unlikely to satisfy those wanting a highly detailed account of their legendary activities & associations.
Decca, Nancy & Unity get the larger share of ink, followed by Diana & Debo. Pam is given less than a handful of pages & brother Tom crops up along the way.
Lovell tries to place a jolly-hockey-sticks interpretation on their capers, but she doesn't succeed. Further, from a current perspective, it's difficult to bein sympathy with subjects who were raised as part of the chinless set who measured their enjoyment of life by how good the hunting had been that season & how many pranks they had played on nanny.
Decca comes across as belligerent, selfish & self-opinionated, despite the worthy causes with which she became associatedin America. Perhaps a book exclusively about her would create a more favourable view, butin this format it's hard to judge whether her support for these issues was due to some innate sense of justice, or if they simply gave her an opportunity for self-aggrandizement.
Hitler-obsessed, anti-Semitic Unity is treated neutrally, perhaps because she remained the Mitfords' darling. Nancy is too frequently hailed as a paragon of literary achievement, as if Lovell is trying to atone for her subject's consistent nastiness toward her siblings & just about everyone else.
Diana & Oswald Mosley are treated with cautious sympathy. Lovell tries to play down the detail that, while they were imprisoned, Churchill personally intervened to improve their lot & that other prisoners were assigned to clean their three-roomed 'cell'.
Taken as a whole, the book is an extremely generous portrayal of a family who abused their powerful connections to protect themselves from having to lump it. The girls claimed affinity with & support for, the downtrodden masses, but they did what they liked, when they liked & could always rely on someone at the very top to dig them out of their self-made holes. The author pulls out all the stops to cast themin the best light, but for at least this reviewer, the sheer awfulness of the Mitfords overwhelms Lovell's attempts to play down their deficits.
Engaging - By: R. Davies, 09 Jul 2008 
This is a well-researched & well-written work, highly interesting & engaging. I felt bereft when I came to the end of it! Lovell has an easy, fluid writing style that keeps the reader hooked.
Lovell makes every effort not to be biased or opinionatedin respect of the extreme politics espoused by three of the sisters, & the result is a level & sensible account of their lives & times. If readers want a Hitler-bashing book, or an anti-Red manifesto, they must look elsewhere.
That Lovell managed to converse with three of the sisters as well as close relatives such as Bob Treuhaft, Dinky Romilly & Charlotte Mosley adds authenticity to this book & leads me to believe that this might be a definitive Mitford tome.
Gushing and a tad too sycophantic - By: Amsterdamned, 29 Jun 2008 Lovell sticks to her promise not to judge the political views of the Mitford family, but her views about everything else cannot be avoided. Everything is "adorable", "delightful", "gorgeous"; & all the protagonists are "handsome" or "beautiful", even when the good quality photographs show decided frumpiness or chinless wonders. Lovell should allow her readers enough nous to decide such things for themselves.
The style is just too gushing & with a little too much forelock tugging. This "romantic novel" approach makes the book easy to read (apart from the author's really annoying habit of using people's nicknames all over the place) but a little too superficial. Her coverage of the period after the Second World War becomes even more superficial, as affairs & deaths are dealt within a single sentence instead of full chapters as at the start of the book. The coverage also differs immensely by sister - those family members without the talent, the principles or the dodgy friends hardly get a look in.
On the positive side, Lovell has structured the book well so that a time line is easy to follow without confusion, & at least I now know more about this family, & understand why I never bothered finding out about them before.
Very enjoyable - By: Ms. MacNeill, 11 Sep 2007 "The Mitford Girls" was one of the first biographies I ever read - & rereading it now after a couple of years, I can see that it is still as enjoyable as it was the first time around. Lovell is clearly fond of her subjects but not, I think, so fond as to be blinded to their faults. Her treatment of Unity, the Nazi, is scrupulously fair - she doesn't seek to defend or excuse her but rather explain her actions - & what's more she includes some interesting analysis on Unity's character & thoughts during the 1930s.
Of course, the book is not perfect. I felt that too little time was spent with Pam & Debo when compared to the other sisters. Perhaps Lovell felt that their lives were not as exciting as the rest, but Pam's supposed lesbianism isn't even mentioned exceptin a footnote - which totally dismisses the idea. I also wish there could have been more information on Tom, the brother; the book focuses a great deal on the girls' parents as well as the girls themselves, so I wish that he'd been mentioned a few more times so as to make him seem less of an outsider.
I also wish that more time was spent on the girls' childhood - the most interesting part of their lives to me - but I suppose Lovell was anxious to get on with the more juicy, scandalous parts.
Although sections of it are rather heavy (for the sections dealing with Unity & Hitler you've got to be quite keen on the history of WWII, I think!), it is an extraordinarily enjoyable book. I found myself crying whenever a key "character" died, which shows that Lovell is a talented storyteller as well as a gifted biographer. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone with even a passing interestin the first half of the twentieth century.
