Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, by Carla Kaplan, Harper, 592 pages.

It may be an inviolable feature of human nature that we rebel against the social station of our upbringing. F. Scott Fitzgerald was besotted by the wealthy because he had not been born into their class; Gore Vidal was a thorn in their side because he had been.

This tendency plays out most strikingly in the phenomenon known as radical chic. The term, now bandied about with nonchalant regularity, originated with the journalist Tom Wolfe, whose 1970 New York magazine article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” sliced through the pretensions and affectations that prompted Leonard Bernstein to round up other high-society types to raise money for the Black Panthers. 

Of course, radical chic predated that particular sociopolitical moment, just as it lives on among the ultra-rich Manhattanites who cast votes for Zohran Mamdani. The writer Jessica Mitford embodied something like radical chic before it was named, but she did so with more gravitas and charm than many. Born in England, in 1917, Mitford was reared in a family of distinction and affluence. Among the seven children born to David Freeman-Mitford and his wife, Sydney, three became writers of prominence—Nancy, Jessica, and Deborah—which all but assured that at least some of them would publicly voice some rebellion against their milieu. This certainly proved true in the case of Jessica, who, bristling at the manners and mores of her natural habitat, signed up with the Communist Party, associated herself with radicals of all stripes, and was a reliable gadfly to the established order of things. Her books included a classic family memoir, Hons and Rebels (1960), and a thoroughgoing evisceration of the cottage industries that seek to monetize mortality, The American Way of Death (1963).

Mitford’s legacy is taken up anew in a recent biography by Carla Kaplan, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford. Like the best of its subject’s works, the book is boldly written and impressively researched—an argument, in fact, for taking radical chic seriously. While Wolfe viewed the ostentatiously left-wing politics of the upper crust as an occasion for satire, Kaplan accepts at face value Mitford’s various transformations and contradictions. This biography is not a case for radical chic, exactly, but it does help explain the tendency in Western arts and letters.

Throughout her book, Kaplan, a professor at Northeastern University, works to establish links between Mitford’s background and bearing and her political views and spirit of what was, by her lights, righteous troublemaking. “Her disarming ways and upper-crust accent charmed targets into revealing more than they meant to, and she never hesitated to let them hoist themselves by their own petards,” Kaplan writes. “She showed that we need not be like others to care about their struggles.” A fair point.

Despite the already considerable prosopography of the Mitford family, Kaplan attends to the clan with freshness and verve. For example, we learn that the Mitford family owned their own church—the structure, that is, not the denomination. We are told they chose pews from which they could “watch the congregation unobserved” and behind which was an imposing banner in oak that bore their family crest and the seemingly comforting motto “God Careth for Us.” But it was not meant to be quite so universally comforting as one might assume. 

“Some pronunciations might stress the second word: ‘Careth,’” Kaplan writes, tongue-in-cheek. “But a proper Mitford family pronunciation stresses the last word ‘us’: ‘God Careth for US.’” Clearly Mitford’s subsequent participation in a political program that purported to mete out life’s blessings more equitably was, in part, a reaction against her insular upbringing. “Decca did not want to fulfill her designated mission to marry well and support Britain’s class structure,” writes Kaplan, referring to Jessica by her nickname. “She wanted to rebel. At eleven years old she opened a ‘running-away account’ at Drummonds Bank, which she used to escape with her second cousin when she was nineteen.”

Mitford deals with that episode, too: In 1937, in the company of that second cousin—and imminent first husband—Esmond Romilly, she charted a course to Spain, then in the midst of its Civil War. Kaplan is attuned to some of the ironies in this situation. “Decca purchased a brown corduroy jumpsuit for fighting in Spain, tucking it into her luggage next to an expensive camera she’d charge to her father’s account,” she writes. Romilly was kin in both fact and spirit. “We … egged each other on to ever greater baiting and acts of outrage against the class we had left,” Mitford said. 

Mitford faced the harsh reality of having to scrimp and save. “No one had ever explained to me that you had to pay for electricity; and lights, electric heaters, stoves,” Mitford said, showing either how sheltered she was or her unshakeable commitment to socialism’s promise of free stuff—or both. (The line between these things becomes increasingly blurred in Mitford’s life and times.) Eventually, the pair ultimately pulled up stakes for the United States. Mitford was defeated neither by her financial straits nor the death of Romilly in the Second World War as a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force. She found a new partner in lawyer Robert Treuhaft, a colleague at the Office of Price Administration, the federal agency at which they were both employed. They wed in 1943, but her family, so to speak, would grow even larger when she threw in with the Communist Party in San Francisco. (She and her husband were by then based in Oakland.) 

Kaplan captures the feeling, misguided but genuine, expressed in the title of Vivian Gornick’s great book The Romance of American Communism. “The Communist Party,” Kaplan writes, “resonated with many young people, as it did with Decca, providing a powerful sense of optimism and hope. It offered both meaning and community.” Though a true believer, Mitford, arguably to her credit, declined to renounce her lifelong habits even after she had radically altered the attitudes with which she had been raised. In addition to retaining—perhaps even flaunting—her accent, she “clung to domestic ineptitude,” Kaplan writes. “Over the kitchen sink, she hung quotes from Lenin on the ‘unproductive … barbarous … arduous … petty’ labor performed by women in the home,” but any well-born woman of means would likely have agreed with that sentiment, too.

Kaplan marvels at the extent of Mitford’s self-creation. “With neither education nor training she’d established her competence as a federal worker and also risen through Community Party ranks as an adept organizer, speaker, writer, and fundraiser,” she writes. She was north of 40 when she committed herself to freelance journalism, which, true to her collectivist convictions, she seems to have approached as a group venture. Not only was Treuhaft her coauthor, sans credit, on The American Way of Death, but Kaplan describes the network of friends with whom Mitford regularly checked in while she toiled on a project: one friend for advice on how she was progressing, another friend for help with spelling and grammar, and so on. “Writing is said to be a lonely task,” Mitford said. “I did not find it so.” 

The book sketches the creation of Hons and Rebels, and dates the origin of The American Way of Death to a piece titled “St. Peter Don’t You Call Me” in the small magazine Frontier. “It revealed her uncanny knack for letting her subjects humiliate themselves,” Kaplan writes. “She used their own words against them, such as an undertaker’s pronouncement that ‘in keeping with the high standard of living, there should be an equally high standard of dying.’” With that, Mitford had the kernel of her book. Again, Kaplan sees in Mitford’s analysis of the funeral industry both sides of her persona. “Her critique of ‘the American way of death’ combined two cultural strains rarely found together: an anti-consumerist/anti-materialistic perspective and a less familiar aristocrat’s disdain for American bourgeois taste—anything faux, new, or fake.” 

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The book loses some steam as Mitford’s career does. It is unworthy of the author of The American Way of Death to produce a book titled The Trial of Dr. Spock, as she did in 1969 with her account of the criminal charges leveled against, among others, American moms’ preferred pediatrician for coming to the aid of Vietnam-era draft dodgers—talk about radical chic. Other books, including Kind and Unusual Punishment: The Prison Business (1973) and The American Way of Birth (1992), were fairly undistinguished, though Mitford remained in demand as a writer of articles and giver of speeches. Her commitment to socialism did not preclude her from taking such assignments on purely financial grounds. As early as the 1960s, “she also accepted most of the essay requests that came her way, because they paid well, or because they were easy to do.” By the 1980s, she would accept no less than $3,000 per speech, whether paid as her total fee or attained by other means, such as travel reimbursement. (She would speak for free about “causes she cared about,” contingent on her expenses being paid for.) “Decca did love parties, being honored, being in large groups of friends and comrades,” Kaplan writes. Comrade or not, maybe she was a savvy capitalist after all.

This all is not to accuse Mitford of hypocrisy but to suggest a curious sort of integrity: She did not attempt to disguise who she was, regardless of whatever agenda she might be peddling. Perhaps her best late book is her memoir of Communism, A Fine Old Conflict (1977), whose title, amusingly, sprung from her misapprehension of a verse in the “Internationale”: For a time, she labored under the delusion that “’tis the final conflict” was, in fact, “’tis a fine old conflict.” Per Kaplan, “The book was written for other radicals, part of Decca’s long dialogue with American activists about how best to be good allies in the struggle to change the world.” Mitford died in 1996 at age 78.

Even those militantly opposed to Mitford’s conception of a “changed world” cannot deny her appeal. In The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, Nancy captured something of the incongruity of her high-born sibling’s radicalism at the time of the Red Scare. “Decca,” Nancy wrote to her fellow novelist in 1951, “has been had up for being a Communist, out on bail. She writes that for what she has done she can get 25 years. Oh my poor mother. But from what we hear nothing much will happen, as they don’t mind open Communists in America nearly as much as the hidden ones.” Nearly a decade later, nothing much had changed. “Is Decca still a communist?” Waugh asked Nancy in 1960. “Jolly uncomfortable for her in U.S.A. I should have thought.” In truth, Jessica Mitford was unlikely to have ever been made jolly uncomfortable by anyone or anything.