Decca - by Jessica Mitford (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The first paperback edition of the letters of the most remarkable of the Mitford sisters--timed to a new streaming series about the ever-fascinating family and a new biography of Jessica coming in 2025.

Born into the British aristocracy as one of the famous (and sometimes infamous) larger-than-life Mitford sisters, Jessica "Decca" Mitford ran away to Spain during the Spanish Civil War with her cousin Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill's nephew, then came to America, became a tireless political activist and a member of the Communist Party, and embarked on a brilliant career as a memoirist and muckraking journalist (her funeral-industry exposé, The American Way of Death, became an instant classic). She was a celebrated wit, a charmer, and throughout her life a prolific and passionate writer of letters--now gathered here.

Decca's correspondence crackles with irreverent humor and mischief, and with acute insight into human behavior (and misbehavior) that attests to her generous experience of the worlds of politics, the arts, journalism, publishing, and high and low society. Here is correspondence with everyone from Katharine Graham, Betty Friedan, Miss Manners, Julie Andrews, Maya Angelou, Harry Truman, and Hillary Rodham Clinton to Decca's sisters the Duchess of Devonshire and the novelist Nancy Mitford, her parents, her husbands, her children, and her grandchildren.

Review Quotes

"[Her] letters are so full of comic set pieces, vivid narrative, and wonderfully replicated speech . . . that one wonders why Mitford never tried writing a novel. . . . Decca is a smashing accumulation. . . . A week with her letters makes everybody else seem a bore." --The New Yorker

"The letters are a treasure. Decca lived and battled by a pen that was as graceful and witty as it was sharp. Teeth were her means of propulsion, her wings; and the marks they left were singularly fine and even to be prized. She was, consummately, a happy warrior." --The New York Times

"On every page of this enormous volume, she is right there -- funny, smart, swinging hard, fiercely uncompromising. . . . Throughout her life, Decca laughs . . . at the quirks and prejudices of the rich or racist. . . . A superb collection." --The Washington Post

"Of all the storied Mitfords, Jessica was the renegade, eloping at nineteen and becoming an activist. Decca captures history's most charming muckraker." -Vogue

"Decca's constant public exposure meant that she knew just about everyone worth knowing. She was involved, directly or indirectly, with some of the twentieth century's most momentous events, from the rise of Nazism through the Spanish Civil War to the civil rights movement. . . . She was a devoted correspondent, with a wide circle of friends, a mischievous sense of fun, and a vast appetite for life." --The New Republic

"The letters, which are equipped with first-rate footnotes, are excellently readable for a number of reasons. For one thing they contain a fiercely engaged person's descriptions of social injustice, especially racial inequality, in the United States, primarily from the 1950s to the mid-1960s . . . As such these letters are exemplary historical documents. But they are also wonderfully entertaining expressions of what one might call sheer joie de lettres, that exhilarating delight that comes from going at a letter full tilt." --The Boston Globe

"A life that was remarkable by any standards. . . . Incurably and instinctively rebellious, brave, adventurous, funny and irreverent, [Mitford] liked nothing better than a good fight, preferably against a pompous and hypocritical target." --J. K. Rowling, Sunday Telegraph

"Sussman is a sublime editor of one of the funniest, most enthralling and gloriously honest collections of contemporary letters I have yet read.. . . Decca's sense of humour flows through her correspondence as brightly and dangerously as a fencer's rapier. Here is a book to be savoured and revisited: impure and undiluted pleasure, from start to finish." --Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times (London)

"Quite delicious. . . . These letters are a treat: not so much a collection of correspondence as an extended conversation on which the reader is invited to eavesdrop. . . . As an example of what a woman can do once she has rid herself of, or at least decided to ignore, the expectations of others - family, men, society - Jessica Mitford will always take some beating. That she is also a hoot is merely the icing on the cake." --The Observer (UK)

"[It's] impossible not to be drawn in by Decca's spiky charm and disarming curiosity. . . . [In] a world that seems to grow ever more homogenized, it is refreshing to encounter a one-of-a-kind character . . . [Who] among us doesn't nurture a feisty inner imp, intent on having the last laugh?" --Slate

"No doubt about it: Jessica Mitford had one hell of a life . . . And yet by far the most interesting thing about Decca, as in anything written by any one of the six Mitford sisters, is her voice." --The Independent (UK)

About the Author

Jessica Mitford is also the author of Hons and Rebels (previously published as Daughters and Rebels), The American Way of Death, The Trial of Dr. Spock, Kind and Usual Punishment, A Fine Old Conflict, Poison Penmanship, Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee, Grace Had an English Heart, and The American Way of Birth. Until her death in 1996, she lived in Oakland, California, with her husband, labor lawyer Robert Treuhaft.

Peter Y. Sussman was an award-winning editor at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1964 to 1993 and has written, edited, taught, and lectured widely since then. He is the coauthor of Committing Journalism and was a coauthor of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics. He lives in Berkeley, California.