Muv
The Story of the Mitford Girls' Mother
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- US$17.99
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The story of the "seventh Mitford woman," a long-overlooked figure in the Mitford canon—told in full for the first time.
Everyone knows about the six flamboyant Mitford girls but in fact there were seven remarkable women in the famous family—the seventh was "Muv," Lady Sydney Redesdale, the mother of the notorious sisters. Too often portrayed as different from them and outside the girl gang, she was really the original and much of her daughters’ strong will, self-confidence, and extremism came from her.
Sydney Redesdale was a divisive figure both among her daughters and subsequent biographers. Until their deaths, her girls were still squabbling over what she was really like, their differing views of her persisted for even longer than the political divides between them. Each daughter wanted to control the narrative and they wrote competing novels, memoirs and letters to vindicate their perspective. For Nancy and Jessica, she was a scapegoat. For Unity, Diana, Debo and Pam, she was a saint.
Biographers have been equally divided about how she should be portrayed. Many wondered how such exceptional children could spring from such ordinary parents, but was Sydney really so "ordinary?" The story of her life at the heart of one of Britain’s most famous families is told in full here for the first time and is a missing piece in understanding one of the twentieth century's most complex and fascinating families.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This slippery account from journalist Trethewey (Mothers of the Mind) seeks to reevaluate Sydney Bowles Mitford, the mother of the six "eccentric" Mitford sisters. Trethewey pushes back against previous depictions—some penned by her own daughters—that cast Sydney (1880–1963) as foolish or cold, while also wrestling with the implications of her lifelong support for Hitler. Beginning with her youth spent in thrall to her "charismatic, self-made" father, Trethewey paints Sydney as stubborn but loving. She tracks Sydney into marriage—to the irascible David "Farve" Mitford—and early motherhood, attempting to show that the Mitford home was mostly happy by favoring the more upbeat recollections of the younger daughters as opposed to elder girls' discontent, and humanizing the well-heeled family by poking fun at Farve's poor business insticts. But as WWII looms, the author's insistent evenhandedness begins to strain—Sydney's open support for Hitler is chalked up to a fundamental naivete, though elsewhere the author defends her shrewdness. Throughout, this history presupposes a false binary between good parenting and bad politics, and between the readers' capacity for censure and sympathy. Trethewey's central argument, that Sydney's "maverick inheritance" and "genuine devotion" had a powerful effect on her daughters, tracks—but the notion that Sydney herself "had the potential to be a rebel" is not convincing. It's an uneven attempt at an unnecessary reclamation.
