TROUBLEMAKER

Rebel daughter.

Based on dozens of interviews and abundant archival sources, scholar and author Kaplan’s book offers a perceptive, sympathetic biography of activist, unabashed communist, and muckraker Jessica Mitford (1917-1996). Jessica, known as Decca, was defiant even as a child—unlike her sisters Nancy, who became a well-known novelist; Nazi sympathizers Diana and Unity; Deborah, who married a duke; and Pamela, who retreated to the countryside. Growing up, the Mitford girls formed a “savage little tribe,” overseen by nannies they exuberantly terrorized. Their parents “called everything outside of their home ‘Elsewhere’ and pronounced themselves against it.” Critical of privilege, Decca kept a “running-away” bank account, which she used to join her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, to fight fascists in Spain. She was 21 when they married. Never having lived on her own, she did not know how to cook, clean, or even wash her underwear. Nevertheless, she took on challenges with charm, optimism, and a “stubborn embrace of difficulty, contradictions, and mess.” And there were many difficulties: Her first child died of measles; Esmond, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot, was shot down during World War II; a son was hit by a truck and died. But Decca rallied. After Esmond’s death, she got a job in Washington, D.C., at the Office of Price Administration, where she showed a talent for “in-depth research, joy in exposing corruption, [and] delight in involving collaborators,” all of which she used to great effect in her first book, a bestselling exposé of the funeral business, The American Way of Death. Her second husband was a Jewish lawyer from the Bronx, as committed an activist as she was. Kaplan captures Decca’s energy and verve, her complicated relationship with her aristocratic family, and her unwavering devotion to fighting injustice, racism, and inequality.

A brisk, engaging biography.