After it was announced yesterday that Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and the youngest of the Mitford sisters, had died I sat downstairs in the coffee shop of the National Library of Scotland looking up at a mute but subtitled TV screen. Black and white photos appeared, beautiful girls sporting the hairstyles of the 1930s along with their wan half smiles. “Diana married Oswald Mosley,” declared the subtitles. “Jessica eloped to Spain with communist Esmond Romilly. She would later become a civil rights activist.”
It struck me. These beautiful, wayward young women, who caused such scandal in their time, were the Kardashians of their day, providing plentiful fodder for the papers, society magazines and gossip rags. When Unity was bought back to the UK after shooting herself in despair over Hitler, the press had a field day, calling for her to be imprisoned as a traitor, while revelling with handwringing schadenfreude at the family’s misfortune. (Unity was later seen by the home secretary, who declared her too mentally fragile to be interned.)
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