the pursuit of love; The letters of the Mitford sisters offer a fascinating study of six dramatically different women.(Book review)

The inspiration for Evelyn Waugh's Bright Young Things, the Mitford sisters ruled the British tabloids of the 1930s and 1940s with their irreverent wit, extreme politics, and total disregard for feminine restraint. There was Nancy, the author, who penned scorching satires of the upper class; Diana, the glacial beauty, who famously left her high-society marriage for Fascist party leader Sir Oswald Mosley; Jessica, the Communist, who eloped to war-torn Spain with Winston Churchill's nephew; and the most notorious of all, Unity, the Nazi, who was never happier than when stalking Hitler in Munich cafes. The apolitical, levelheaded Deborah, the youngest (and lone surviving) sister, became the stately Duchess of Devonshire. Only Pamela shunned the spotlight for a country life. (A brother, Tom, died in the war.)

The Mitford flame has never gone out, thanks to a number of rollicking biographies and books about them, as well as their own widely read accounts of what seems to have been a whimsically feral childhood on a drafty Cotswold estate-Diana and Jessica penned memoirs, while Nancy's novels wore but the most diaphanous of fictive veils. But nothing captures their enduring allure quite like their own correspondence, collected for the first time in Charlotte Mosley's The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (HarperCollins). Mosley, Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law, had unrestricted access to an astonishing 12,000 letters, only about 5 percent of which are included here.

Beginning with a tender 1925 note from Pamela to Diana, recuperating after a tonsillectomy, and ending with a poignant 2002 fax from Deborah to an ailing Diana, Mosley highlights the sisters' ...