A review of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan, 592 pages, Hurst (December 2025)

In this first-rate biography, American literature professor Carla Kaplan re-examines the life of Jessica Mitford, a young woman born into wealth and privilege who traded her aristocratic position for communist politics. Throughout her account of Mitford’s eventful life, Kaplan emphasises her subject’s sceptical and anti-authoritarian personality. But this was only half of the picture.

Jessica Lucy “Decca” Mitford (1917–96) was sister to Nancy, Deborah, Tom, Diana, Unity, and Pamela—the sixth of seven children born to British peer David Freeman Mitford and his wife Sydney. The parents were as eccentric as their children would turn out to be. David didn’t want women in parliament because he feared they would use the restroom and he kept a pet mongoose. Sydney was terrified of doctors (she poured all medicine down the sink) and refrigeration. Both hated formal education, which David—according to Kaplan—believed would “thicken his daughters’ ankles,” while Sydney worried that the company of other children would be “overstimulating.” This caused Decca great resentment. “The thing that absolutely burned into my soul,” she would later write, “was the business of not being allowed to go to school.”

Sydney Mitford’s mode of homeschooling consisted of reading aloud to her children and then quizzing them about what they had just been told. So, the six Mitford girls and their brother led a cloistered life on their parents’ 20,000-acre estate with a retinue of cooks, maids, and gardeners. “It was neither necessary, nor generally possible,” Decca reflected later, “to leave the premises for any of the normal human pursuits.” Neglected by their parents, the siblings developed their own code, which they often used to tell dirty jokes in front of adults. This ungoverned group of children—referred to by one observer as “a savage little tribe”—were so unruly that governesses and tutors would often flee the estate in tears.

Kaplan describes the world the children created in the estate’s adult-free library: “They spent almost all their time there, reading, inventing games, playing piano … so the children lived a world apart, and they took advantage of that freedom to invent their own society of rules, rank, games, languages, pranks, cruelties and occasional kindnesses.” This insularity was further fed by their father’s racism and misanthropy. As Decca wrote in 1960: