Michael Dirda

The charming correspondence of a feisty British aristocrat who became a larger-than-life writer.

DECCA

The Letters of Jessica Mitford

Edited by Peter Y. Sussman

Knopf. 744 pp. $35

Mitford? Now where have we heard that name before? Let me count the ways, or at least a few of them.

Once upon a time, in England, Lord and Lady Redesdale had six daughters and one son. All the girls were good-looking but a little out of the ordinary, especially after they grew up. Nancy resided in Paris, lived "in sin" and wrote delicious comic novels, including The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Deborah married very, very well, becoming the duchess of Devonshire and chatelaine of the great English country house Chatsworth. Unity, alas, got to be an intimate friend of Adolf Hitler, whom she just adored, and shot herself in the head on the day Britain declared war on Germany. The particularly beautiful Diana divorced her first husband to wed her lover, the infamous British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. Brother Tom was killed during World War II, and sister Pam somehow led a quiet, fairly conventional life, probably just to be different.

And then there was Jessica (1917-96). If you don't know about Decca, as everyone called her, just start reading this terrific collection of letters and hang on for the ride.

During the 1930s, Decca took off to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War with her boyfriend and eventual husband, Esmond Romilly. Later, the adventurous lovebirds moved to Washington, where they became close chums with the young Katharine and Philip Graham, as well as the crusading civil libertarians Virginia and Clifford Durr. After World War II broke out, Esmond enlisted, returned to Britain, and one day never came back from a flying mission. Esmond's uncle, Winston Churchill, told Decca that there was no hope of her 23-year-old husband being found alive.

By this time, Decca was working for the Office of Price Administration and was happy to leave Washington, with its painful memories, for a position in San Francisco. There, she married a crusading young attorney named Robert Treuhaft. The two almost immediately joined the American Communist Party, tirelessly focusing their efforts on the cause of civil rights. This never changed, even after they quit the party in the late 1950s. Throughout his career, Treuhaft took on myriad cases of perceived injustice, defending the wrongfully accused, agitating for retrials, fighting for prisoners' rights. He even became lawyer to the legendary Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and something of a hero of the times. In the late 1960s, a young Yale law student named Hillary Rodham spent a summer clerking for Treuhaft's law firm.

Meanwhile, Decca, the subversive housewife, reared three children, agitated, protested, and wrote magazine articles, a memoir of the Mitford family ( Hons and Rebels) and, as this book shows, lots of letters. Wonderful letters. On every page of this enormous volume, she is right there -- funny, smart, swinging hard, fiercely uncompromising. In 1943, she complained to Churchill ("Dear Cousin Winston") about the Mosleys' release from prison on health grounds: "My personal feeling is that the release of the Mosleys is a slap in the face to antifascists in every country, and that it is a direct betrayal of those who have died for the cause of anti-fascism. The fact that Diana is my sister doesn't alter my opinion on this subject." For the rest of her life, she remained "off-speakers" with Diana, and the two sisters never saw each other again.

But Decca corresponded regularly with Lady Redesdale, Nancy and Deborah (or "Debo"). On June 25, 1950, she wrote to her very proper and conservative mother, in an example of what she sometimes called the "Mitford tease": "Could you possibly ring up the Daily Worker next time you're in London & ask them whether they know of any interesting mass meetings or demonstrations in Paris scheduled for late Sept. or early October; if so, we could arrange accordingly about when to go to Paris." She ends another note to Lady Redesdale with this P.S.: "On re-reading this letter I see it is full of references to jails, sorry, but that is where most of our friends are."

Throughout her life, Decca laughs -- "roars" is her favorite verb -- at the quirks and prejudices of the rich or racist. Here are two anecdotes from a single letter (June 19, 1957), describing a wedding in Montgomery, Ala.: