| Not many of us would have wished to swap places with the second Lord Redesdale, the father of the volatile Mitford sisters who gained notoriety in Britain during the 1930s. The sanest of them, Nancy, matured into a skilled novelist and produced an incisive analysis of U for Upper and non-U English; Unity despite her British nationality became a table companion of the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler; Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, a Conservative MP who later founded the British States where, much to the chagrin of the fraternity of American morticians, she wrote a brilliant expose of their funerary practices and customs, entitled ‘The American Way of Death.’ |
| Another book on a similar theme - The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh which had appeared earlier in 1948 - had used as its setting the mortuaries of California, but unlike Ms Mitford’s work, it was an exaggeration of fact into plausible fiction. Ms Mitford had approached what to most human beings is a serious matter by taking a scientific approach, researching extensively and methodically. The information she disinterred was quite shocking. [EXTRACT] |
Published in THE NATION 10 Sept. 1992, and reprinted in the ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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