Beautiful. Amusing. Notorious.

[dianamitford]

Diana has been in her flat & somebody has written shit & things on the door & D said ‘Of course they think the busy little housewife will clean it off, but really darling I can’t be bothered.’

[Nancy Mitford in a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 1946]

[dianamitford]

Lady Diana Mosley, taken when she attended a London police court, where a man appeared charged with breaking and entering Lady Mosley’s flat at Dolphin Square. Lady Mosley is at present interned in Holloway Prison.

February 1942

[eccentricks]

Dearest Hen,

Honks [Diana] & Sir O & Woman [Pamela] & I went to see the film of us re Nancy last week, also Jonathan & Middy. We squeezed into a tiny room in a basement in Soho among Porn, Hard & Soft (whatever that may mean), & saw the uncut version.

You will SCREAM - Woman’s the star, absolutely at ease & saying things like ‘Of course it was most unusual for ANYONE to travel 3rd class in those days.’ I love the idea of masses of 3rd class carriages thundering empty through the length and breadth of England. She is brill, & reading about the Chubb Fuddler on a tree stump by the Windrush.

Diana & I are v. boringly discreet, I look like a headmistress about to retire & sit absolutely still. Honks looks 1,000, which she doesn’t in real life. Her house looks beautiful, which it does in real life. You are practiced in the art, the only one of us (except Honks, once) who has done it before, oh how unfair. The view from your typewriter is distinctly limited, oh Hen fancy staring into a wall when between words, how can you think what to put.

Julian says there is much alteration to do, viz. he has left out all re Mitford voice & awfulness thereof but he’s going to put that in.

Much love, Yr Hen

[Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire to her sister Jessica Mitford, 24 Feb 1980]

[dianamitford]

“Diana was the best kind of girl: she was always funny, and she was off-hand about her beauty. I sat next to her once when she was wearing a cashmere polo-neck all fluffed up and at one point, in the middle of some anecdote or other, she just carelessly brushed her right breast and de-fluffed it. She was pushing 80 and I thought it was the most sensuous gesture I’d ever seen.”

-A.N. Wilson

[dianamitford]

“Diana seemed different since her marriage. She was now a Beauty with a capital B. Photographs of her stared from the covers of weeklies with great regularity; her portrait was painted by a dozen artists. Her face always seemed to come out looking the same-- large, calm, gazing rather vacantly into space; and she seemed to be getting like that in real life, too. 

Diana’s manner towards me had changed, too. She became uniformly, and annoyingly, kind and gentle, treating me with a brand of restrained patience usually reserved for babies, animals, or half-wits. I felt she must be developing a beautiful character to go with her face.” 

-Jessica Mitford, “Hons and Rebels”

[themitfordsisters]

The Duchess of Marlborough, M. Corbin, the French Ambassador, the Hon. Mrs. Bryan Guinness (Diana Mitford), and Mr. Dane Tree watching Josephine Baker on the first night of the new revue at the Prince Edward Theatre.

[themitfordsisters]

[fradine]

I’m not nearly as clever as you are & I terribly regret your one blind spot, you would LOVE not just Proust, but Flaubert, Henry James, George Eliot, Goethe’s novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, all these brilliant treasures & many more. I think possibly it comes from impatience, you want to be up & doing, well you are & think of the wonderful achievements! You have got the patience to plant trees, hedges, you know they take ages but once they’re in they grow & you can be doing again, something else. You don’t want to sit ruminating over a book, you want quick action. I do regret it, I can’t help it, thinking how you would laugh at Proust’s jokes or be terrified by Conrad’s descrip of the slow fire in a cargo of coal ready to turn & drown them all if the wind changes. It’s true my world is peopled by characters in books, & it’s a mystery how you, so interested in human nature, can do without it seen through eyes of genius. But perhaps it’s clever nature at work which gave you a task far more important than just loving to read. Your fund of wonderful human sympathy is much more unselfish, in fact reading is selfish & would probably waste your time which you spend making life bearable for one & all. So in the end I applaud your choice. It is much cleverer to do than just to think.

Diana, Lady Mosley in a letter to her sister Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (via fradine)

[beatonandbeyond]

Diana Mitford photographed by Madame Yevonde, 1932

[themitfordsisters]

Diana Guinness (Mitford), Peter Watson and Robin D’Erlanger at the Edwardian party. 

Date: December 27, 1933.

[dianamitford]

“Thank you so much for your beautiful party, where I left my hat and the remains of my heart. When can I get hold of you? You looked so ravishing last night that I am reconsidering the picture.”

-Augustus John to Diana Mitford, whom he was painting at the time, 1932.

This Augustus John sketch of Diana Mitford was owned by Elizabeth Taylor and sold at auction for $640 in 2019.

[baptisms-]

[strivingforwhatisnotworthhaving]

Diana Mitford, early 1930s

[nicolebonnet-deactivated2016111]

When Bryan introduced Diana to his mother he broke staggering news: ‘And she can cook, Mummy.’ Lady Evelyn, a delightful eccentric who only ever spoke in whispers, was dumbfounded. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s too clever,’ she said faintly. Diana was modestly self-deprecating, and explained she could only fry eggs. ‘Anyone can do fried eggs,’ she said lightly. But it was too late, the word went round and soon even the nursery staff at Bailiffscourt had taken up the refrain: ‘To be able to cook – too wonderful.’

[mitfordgirls]

In the 1950s my mother-in-law did voluntary work in the East End of London. She was a friend of Bunny Mellon, wife of the Anglophile philanthropist Paul Mellon…She heard of the poverty among the women and how cheered they would be by some new clothes, so on her return to America she arranged for what looked like cardboard coffins to be sent to Moucher at Eaton Square. Out came wondrous garments by Balenciaga: brocade evening dresses, a black winter coat lavishly trimmed with black mink, and piles of less showy but beautifully made coats, skirts and cocktail dresses. Moucher said that my sisters and I could take our pick, which we did, replacing the Balenciagas with decent, unworn clothes of our own that satisfied my mother-in-law’s charitable purposes. The master couturier’s clothes had come to a good home: they were well out of our reach to buy first-hand, but no one could have appreciated them more and we wore them time and again. Diana looked dangerously beautiful in the black coat with black mink facings. We met for lunch one day in London, at the Aperitif Restaurant in Jermyn Street, she a vision in The Coat. We sat down and looked round. I spied Paul Mellon and said, ‘Oh, I must go and say hello.’ Diana gave a scream and tried to make herself look small (impossible), terrified that he would recognize his wife’s coat and snatch it off her back. She and Nancy shared a white satin evening dress they called 'Robeling’, which was kept for the grandest occasions. Nancy also had one of those simple linen dresses that are immediately recognizable (by those accustomed to such luxuries) as the very height of haute couture. She wore it in Venice where a friend remarked on it. 'Oh well,’ said Nancy, 'I always think one should have ONE good dress.’ It was so like her not to admit to its origin.

Deborah Mitford (via mitfordgirls)

[mitfordgirls]

Diana and Unity Mitford attend a movie premiere, 1935.

[mitfordgirls]

Diana and Nancy Mitford attend the ballet with Brian Howard.

[eccentricks]

“It is impossible to forgive Unity. She condemned herself out of her own mouth.” —Diana Mitford