Lives More Exciting Than Fiction by Marilyn Levinson

I am an Anglophile. I love reading books written by English authors. When I was still traveling, my husband and I often visited England. Of course we went to London, but most of our trips were devoted to spending time in a small section of the country. We stopped at manor houses and historical sites, craft shops, and picturesque villages.

I love so many English writers--the popular like Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters--as well as others less well known like Barbara Pym, Angela Thirkell, Mary Wesley, and Joanna Trollope. For years, I was enchanted by the Bloomsbury Group. While reading Virginia's diaries I made a point of stopping at the house where Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell had grown up. Entering it, I was dismayed to see that the house had recently been broken up into flats, and wrote a poem about it. A happier visit was to Charleston Farmhouse, where Vanessa lived with Duncan Grant, and the floors and walls are covered with their artwork.

But no British family caught my lasting fascination like the Mitfords, an eccentric British aristocratic family. There were six sisters--Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah--and a brother, Tom, who died in World War Two. Many books have been written and TV productions created around the six sisters, so unique and always in the news. Nancy, the oldest, was an author. Her novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, are loosely based on her own life.  Pamela, the nurturer, preferred a quiet life. Beautiful Diana married Bryan Guinness, heir to the Irish brewing fortune, but left him for Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. Diana was an admirer of Hitler and the Nazis. She and Mosley went to prison from 1940-43.

Unity became a good friend of Adolf Hitler. When England declared war against Germany, she shot herself in the head and ended up living with brain damage until she died of meningitis at the age of 33.

Reading Jessica's autobiography Daughters and Rebels (Hons and Rebels in the UK) was like reading a romantic adventure novel. Frustrated because her parents educated her at home with awful governesses instead of sending her to school, Jessica managed to "escape" her homelife by falling in love and eloping with a second cousin, Esmond Romilly (Churchill's nephew by marriage.) She shared his communist leanings and went to Spain with him to support the Loyalists. The Romillys ended up living in the United States. When England declared war on Germany, Romilly joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was killed.

My favorite sister is Deborah, the youngest, who married Andrew Cavendish and became Duchess of Devonshire. On one trip to England, my husband and I stayed in the Deborah room of the Cavendish Hotel, which is owned by the Chatsworth Estate where the Cavendish family lives. Visiting Chatsworth House and the estate was memorable. As was reading Deborah's memoir Wait for Me! Again, it is as though Hollywood had come up with a fairytale story, though not without its sad moments. Deborah's husband, a second son, inherited Chatsworth when his older brother William died fighting in World War Two. (William's widow, Kathleen Kennedy, sister of JFK, died in a plane crash 4 years later.)

Deborah worked tirelessly to make Chatsworth the showcase it is now--restoring the house and creating several commercial enterprises connected to the estate as well as writing books about it. Deborah was down to earth and not as eccentric as many of her sisters. She was as comfortable entertaining royalty and famous statesmen and their families as she was working in Chatsworth's gift shop.

What other families do you think include members that have led lives more exciting than fiction?