26 Facts About Jessica Mitford

Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics.

Jessica Mitford had little formal education, but nevertheless did a great deal of reading.

Jessica Mitford later described her conservative father as "one of nature's fascists", renounced her privileged background while still a teenager, and became an adherent of communism.

Jessica Mitford had crushed the trade unions, he had crushed the Communist Party and he had crushed the Jews.

At the age of 19, Jessica Mitford met her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was recuperating from dysentery caught during a stint with the International Brigades defending Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

Jessica Mitford gave birth at home to a daughter, Julia Decca Romilly, on 20 December 1937.

The baby died in a measles epidemic the following May Jessica Mitford rarely spoke of Julia in later life and she is not referred to by name in Mitford's 1960 autobiography, Hons and Rebels.

In 1939, Romilly and Jessica Mitford emigrated to the United States.

At the outset of World War II, Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force; Jessica Mitford was living in Washington DC, and considered joining him once he was posted to England.

Jessica Mitford's husband went missing in action on 30 November 1941, on his way back from a bombing raid over Nazi Germany.

Jessica Mitford became closer to her own mother by letter over the decades, but remained estranged from her sister Diana for the rest of her life.

Jessica Mitford spent much of the early 1950s working as executive secretary of the local Civil Rights Congress chapter.

In 1956, Jessica Mitford published a pamphlet, "Lifeitselfmanship or How to Become a Precisely-Because Man".

In 1960, Jessica Mitford published her first book Hons and Rebels, a memoir covering her youth in the Jessica Mitford household.

In May 1961, Jessica Mitford travelled to Montgomery, Alabama, while working on an article about Southern attitudes for Esquire.

Jessica Mitford published The Trial of Dr Spock, the Rev William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

Jessica Mitford was a distinguished professor for the one semester in 1973 at San Jose State University, where she taught a course called "The American Way" that covered the Watergate scandal and the McCarthy era.

Jessica Mitford titled the book after what, in her youth, she thought were the lyrics to the Communist anthem, "The Internationale", which actually are "Tis the final conflict".

Jessica Mitford mercilessly teased an elder Communist about what she perceived as his paranoia when he wrote out the name of a town where she could get chickens donated from "loyal party members" for a fund raiser.

Jessica Mitford performed at numerous benefits and opened for Cyndi Lauper on the roof of the Virgin Records store in San Francisco.

Jessica Mitford's last work was an update entitled The American Way of Death Revisited.

Jessica Mitford's surviving daughter, Constancia Romilly, continued the activist tradition, working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which campaigned for African-American civil rights; she eventually became an emergency room nurse.

Jessica Mitford's younger son, Ben Treuhaft, is a piano tuner based in Coventry, UK.

The author Christopher Hitchens expressed his admiration for Jessica Mitford and praised Hons and Rebels.

Jessica Mitford ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War, taking with her a camera that she had charged to her father's account.

In 2010, Leslie Brody's biography of Mitford, Irrepressible, The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford was published by Counterpoint Press.