In this video, we explore the Mitford sisters, six aristocratic daughters of Lord Redesdale whose wit, beauty, scandals, and radically opposed politics made them the most talked-about siblings in English high society, and whose choices tore their own family apart.

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Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah were born between 1904 and 1920 to David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney. Raised largely at home in the Cotswolds, with little formal schooling and a famously eccentric father, the sisters grew up teasing, competing, and inventing private languages that would later fill novels, memoirs, and decades of correspondence.

Their danger was not physical. It lay in what they did with their talent, charm, and access. Between them, the six sisters touched literature, fascism, communism, war, royal circles, and some of the grandest houses in Britain.

Nancy, the eldest, turned her family into fiction. Her sharp, comic novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate made Lord Redesdale immortal as the explosive Uncle Matthew and made Nancy one of the most celebrated English writers of her generation. Her wit could be merciless, and her sisters did not always escape it.

Diana was considered the great beauty of the family. She married Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, then left him for Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Their 1936 wedding took place in Berlin, with Adolf Hitler among the guests. During the Second World War, Diana and Mosley were interned without trial as security risks.

Unity became the family's most notorious figure. Fascinated by Nazi Germany, she moved to Munich, pursued Hitler until she entered his circle, and became openly devoted to him. When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Unity shot herself in the head in Munich. She survived, was returned to Britain with permanent brain damage, and died in 1948 at 33.

Jessica rebelled in the opposite direction. Rejecting her family's world, she embraced communism, eloped with Winston Churchill's nephew Esmond Romilly, and followed him toward the Spanish Civil War. After Romilly was killed in the Second World War, she built a new life in America, married civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, and became a campaigning journalist whose book The American Way of Death exposed the funeral industry.

Pamela chose a quieter life in the countryside, away from ideology and headlines. Her calm was so unusual within the family that it became part of her legend.

Deborah, the youngest, married Lord Andrew Cavendish in 1941. When he unexpectedly became Duke of Devonshire, she became chatelaine of Chatsworth and helped transform one of England's greatest houses into a thriving modern estate and public attraction.

The sisters' politics made family life brutal. Communist Jessica refused for years to reconcile with fascist Diana. Nancy privately told the authorities that Diana was dangerous during the war. Loyalty, rivalry, and affection coexisted with feuds that lasted decades.

Tragedy followed them as well. Their only brother, Tom, was killed in Burma in 1945. Unity's decline, the collapse of marriages, and the sisters' public reputations cast a long shadow over the family's once-privileged world.

This is the story of how six sisters from one country house became symbols of the extremes of twentieth-century Europe, and why the Mitfords still fascinate, divide, and scandalize readers nearly a century later.

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