| 词条 | Jessica Mitford | ||||||
| 释义 |
|honorific_prefix= The Honourable |name = Jessica Mitford |image = Jessica Mitford, by William Acton.jpg |caption = Mitford by William Acton, 1937 |birth_name = Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford |birth_date = {{birth date|1917|9|11|df=y}} |birth_place = Gloucestershire, England |death_date = {{death date and age|1996|7|22|1917|9|11|df=y}} |death_place = Oakland, California, U.S. |nationality = British |citizenship = British American (naturalised) |known_for = Mitford sister, Communist, Hons and Rebels, The American Way of Death |occupation = Investigative journalist |years_active = |home_town = |spouse = {{marriage|Esmond Romilly |1937|1941|end=went MIA}} {{marriage|Robert Treuhaft |1943}} |children = 4 |parents = David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale Sydney Bowles |family = Mitford }} Jessica Lucy 'Decca' Freeman-Mitford (11 September 1917 – 22 July 1996) was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics. Jessica, who represented the far left, married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, killed in World War II, and then American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, with whom she joined the American Communist Party and worked closely in the Civil Rights Congress. Both refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, but later resigned from the party out of disillusion with Stalinism. Her memoirs Hons and Rebels, and a social commentary The American Way of Death, both became classics. Early life and ancestryBorn at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire,[1] the sixth of seven children, Jessica Mitford was the daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney (daughter of politician and publisher Thomas Bowles), and grew up in a series of her father's country houses. She had little formal education, but nevertheless did a great deal of reading. Her sisters Unity and Diana were well-known members of the British Union of Fascists and ultimately became close friends of Adolf Hitler. Diana even married the British Union of Fascists' Leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. Upon the outbreak of war between Great Britain and Nazi Germany, Unity tried to commit suicide in Munich and Diana and her husband were interned without trial for the duration of the war. Jessica (always known as Decca) later described her father as "one of nature's fascists", renounced her privileged background at an early age and became an adherent of Stalinism.[2] She was known as the "red sheep" of the family.[3]
|collapsed=yes |align=center |boxstyle_1=background-color: #fcc; |boxstyle_2=background-color: #fb9; |boxstyle_3=background-color: #ffc; |boxstyle_4=background-color: #bfc; |boxstyle_5=background-color: #9fe; |1= Jessica Mitford |2= David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale |3= Sydney Bowles |4= Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale |5= Lady Clementine Gertrude Helen Ogilvy |6= Thomas Gibson Bowles |7= Jessica Evans-Gordon |8= Henry Reveley Mitford |9= Georgiana Jemima Ashburnham |10= David Ogilvy, 10th Earl of Airlie |11= Henrietta Blanche Stanley |12= Thomas Milner Gibson |13= Susannah Bowles |14= General Charles Evans-Gordon |15= Catherine (Kate) Rose |16= Henry Reveley Mitford, son of William Mitford |17= Mary Anstruther |18= George Ashburnham, 3rd Earl of Ashburnham |19= Lady Charlotte Percy |20= David Ogilvy, 9th Earl of Airlie |21= Clementina Drummond |22= Edward Stanley, 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley |23= Henrietta Dillon |24= Thomas Milner Gibson |25= Isabella Glover |26= William Bowles{{Citation needed|date=May 2016}} |27= Mary-Ann Dawes{{Citation needed|date=May 2016}} |28= George Evans{{Citation needed|date=May 2016}} |29= Frances Spalding{{Citation needed|date=May 2016}} |30= Rev. Dr. Alexander Rose |31= Janet McIntosh }} Marriages and familyLife with Esmond RomillyAt the age of 19, 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. Romilly was a nephew (by marriage) of Winston Churchill.[4] The cousins immediately fell in love and decided to elope to Spain, where Romilly picked up work as a reporter for the News Chronicle. After some legal difficulties caused by their relatives' opposition, they married. They moved to London and lived in the East End, then mostly a poor industrial area. 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.[2] In 1939, Romilly and Mitford emigrated to the United States. They travelled around, working odd jobs, perpetually short of money.[2] At the outset of World War II, Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force; Mitford was living in Washington D.C., and considered joining him once he was posted to England. While living in D.C, with contemporaries Virginia Foster Durr and Clifford Durr, she gave birth to another daughter, Constancia Romilly ("the Donk" or "Dinky") on 9 February 1941.[5] Her husband went missing in action on 30 November 1941, on his way back from a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Life with Robert TreuhaftMitford threw herself into war work. Through this, she met and married the American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft in 1943 and eventually settled in Oakland, California.[6] She became an American citizen in 1944.[7] There, the couple had two sons; Nicholas, born in 1944 (who was killed in 1955 when hit by a bus), and Benjamin, born in 1947.[1] Mitford approached her motherhood in a spirit of "benign neglect", described by her children as "matter-of-fact" and "not touchy-feely".[8] She became closer to her own mother by letter over the decades but remained estranged from her sister Diana for the rest of her life. Career and politicsStalinism and left-wing politicsMitford spent much of the early 1950s working as executive secretary of the local Civil Rights Congress chapter. Through this and her husband's legal practice, she was involved in a number of civil rights campaigns, notably the failed attempt to stop the execution of Willie McGee, an African-American convicted of raping a white woman. Mitford and Treuhaft became active members of the Communist Party. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyism and the 'Red Scare', they were summoned to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both refused to testify about their participation in Stalinist organizations.[9] In 1956, Mitford published a pamphlet, "Lifeitselfmanship or How to Become a Precisely-Because Man". In response to Noblesse Oblige, the book her sister Nancy co-wrote and edited on the class distinctions in British English, popularizing the phrases "U and non-U English" (upper class and non-upper class), Jessica described L and non-L (Left and non-Left) English, mocking the clichés used by her comrades in the all-out class struggle.[10][11] (The title alludes to Stephen Potter's satirical series of books that included Lifemanship.) Disillusioned by the revelations of Joseph Stalin's crimes against humanity in Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech, Mitford and Treuhaft resigned from the American Communist Party in 1958.[12] In 1960 Mitford published her first book Hons and Rebels (US title: Daughters and Rebels), a memoir covering her youth in the Mitford household. Investigative journalismIn May 1961 she traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, while working on an article about Southern attitudes for Esquire. While there, she and a friend went to meet the arrival of the Freedom Riders and became caught up in a riot when a mob led by the Ku Klux Klan attacked the civil rights activists. After the riot, Mitford proceeded to a rally led by Martin Luther King, Jr. The church at which this was held was also attacked by the Klan, and Mitford and the group spent the night barricaded inside until the siege was ended by the arrival of Alabama National Guard troops. Through his work with unions and death benefits, Treuhaft became interested in the funeral industry and persuaded Mitford to write an investigative article on the subject. Though the article, "Saint Peter Don't You Call Me" published in Frontier magazine, was not widely disseminated, it caught considerable attention when Mitford appeared on a local television broadcast with two industry representatives. Convinced of public interest, she wrote The American Way of Death, which was published in 1963. In the book Mitford harshly criticized the industry for using unscrupulous business practices to take advantage of grieving families. The book became a major bestseller and led to Congressional hearings on the funeral industry. The book was one of the inspirations for filmmaker Tony Richardson's 1965 film The Loved One, which was based on Evelyn Waugh's short satirical 1948 novel of the same name,[13] tellingly subtitled "An Anglo-American Tragedy". After The American Way of Death Mitford continued with her investigative journalism. In 1970, she published an article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers", an exposé of the Famous Writers School, a correspondence course of questionable business practices founded by Bennett Cerf. She published The Trial of Dr. Spock, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman and Marcus Raskin, an account of the five men's 1970 trial on charges of conspiracy to violate the draft laws, followed by a harsh critique of the American prison system entitled Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business (1973), an allusion to the phrase "cruel and unusual punishment". Mitford was a distinguished professor for the fall semester 1973 at San Jose State University, where she taught a course called "The American Way" that covered the Watergate scandal and the McCarthy era. Because of disagreements with the dean over her taking a loyalty oath and submitting to fingerprinting, the campus was thrown into protests and she was forced to go to court to remain able to teach.[14] Books and musicMitford's second memoir, A Fine Old Conflict (1977), comically describes her experiences joining and eventually leaving the Communist Party USA. 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". Mitford recounts how she was invited to join the Communist Party by her co-worker Dobby, to whom she responded "We thought you'd never ask!" She bristled against the conservative structure in the CP, at one point upsetting the women's caucus by printing a poster with "Girls! Girls! Girls!" to draw people to an event. She 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. When he wrote Petaluma on a scrap of paper to avoid being overheard by possible bugs, she asked in jest how the chickens should be prepared, and wrote, "Fried or broiled". In addition to writing and activism, Mitford tried her hand at music as singer for "Decca and the Dectones," a cowbell and kazoo orchestra. She performed at numerous benefits and opened for Cyndi Lauper on the roof of the Virgin Records store in San Francisco. She recorded two short albums: one[15] contains her rendition of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Grace Darling",[16] and the other, two duets with friend and poet Maya Angelou.[17] Her last work was an update entitled The American Way of Death Revisited. DeathMitford died of lung cancer aged 78. In keeping with her wishes, she had an inexpensive funeral, costing $533.31 – she was cremated without a ceremony, her ashes scattered at sea, the cremation itself costing $475.[3][18] At the time of her death, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote "In this strangely flat era of 'diversity,' she was the rarest of birds, an exotic creature who rose each morning to become the sun around whom thousands of lives revolved." [19] Her widower survived her by five years. DescendantsTwo of her four children pre-deceased her. Her surviving daughter, Constantia 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. Romilly had two children with Committee director James Forman: James Forman Jr., a Yale professor, and Chaka Forman, an actor. Legacy and influenceThe author Christopher Hitchens expressed his admiration for Jessica Mitford and praised Hons and Rebels.[20] J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, stated in 2002: {{quote|My most influential writer, without a doubt, is Jessica Mitford. When my grand-aunt gave me Hons and Rebels when I was 14, she instantly became my heroine. She 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. I wished I'd had the nerve to do something like that. I love the way she never outgrew some of her adolescent traits, remaining true to her politics — she was a self-taught socialist — throughout her life. I think I've read everything she wrote. I even called my daughter Jessica Rowling Arantes after her.[21]}}Rowling reviewed Mitford's book of letters, Decca, in the Sunday Telegraph in 2006.[22] In 2013 the singer David Bowie named The American Way of Death as one of his favorite books.[23] Quotations{{unreferenced section|date=June 2013}}
The Mitford siblings
GalleryBibliography
Dramatization
See also
References1. ^1 Anne Chisholm, [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-jessica-mitford-1330361.html "Obituary: Jessica Mitford"], The Independent, 25 July 1996. 2. ^1 2 {{cite book|last=Mitford|first=Jessica |title=Hons and Rebels|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=U6VIAAAAYAAJ| year=1960| publisher=Isis|isbn=978-1-85089-441-4}} 3. ^1 Thomas Mallon, "Red Sheep: How Jessica Mitford found her voice", New Yorker, 16 October 2006. 4. ^{{cite book|last1=Romilly|first1=Esmond|title=Boadilla|url=|year=1938|publisher=Hamish Hamilton|location= London}} 5. ^{{cite book|last=Salmond|first=John A. |title=The Conscience of a Lawyer: Clifford J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899-1975|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0TmaV1DuO7QC&pg=PA264|year=1990|publisher=University of Alabama Press|location=Tuscaloosa|isbn=978-0-8173-0453-9|page=264}} 6. ^{{Cite news | title = Communist on The Hit Parade | author = | newspaper= Tocsin|volume=5|issue=9|page=1 Col A|location =Oakland, CA | date = 4 March 1964 | accessdate = 2018-05-25 | url = http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White%20Materials/White%20Magazines%20And%20Articles/Tocsin/03-04-64.pdf | language = | quote = }} 7. ^{{cite book|last=Lovell|first=Mary S. |title=The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2oZ2mxtiCy0C|year=2008|publisher=Little, Brown|isbn=978-0-7481-0921-0|page=403}} 8. ^{{cite news| url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/14/DDG6PMAKDA34.DTL | title=Great writer. But as a mother? Jessica Mitford's children recall the woman they called Decca | first=Edward | last=Guthmann | date=17 November 2006 | work=The San Francisco Chronicle}} 9. ^{{cite book|last=Vangen|first=A. D. |title=Honoring God to the Very, Very, Very End!|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MFDbgRIhDYQC&pg=PA113|year=2011|publisher=Xulon Press|isbn=978-1-61379-893-5|page=113}} 10. ^{{cite web | last = Severo | first = Richard | date = 23 July 1996 | title = Jessica Mitford, Mordant Critic of American Ways, and a British Upbringing, Dies at 78 | work = The New York Times | publisher = Jessica Mitford Memorial Site | url = http://www.mitford.org/nytimes.htm | accessdate = 28 October 2007}} 11. ^{{cite web | last = Cohen | first = Nick | authorlink = Nick Cohen | date = 20 August 2001 | title = Do you speak New Labour? | work = New Statesman | url = http://www.newstatesman.com/200108200009 | accessdate = 28 October 2007}} 12. ^{{cite book|last=Mitford|first=Jessica |title=A Fine Old Conflict|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Mpy2AAAACAAJ|year=1977|publisher=M. Joseph|isbn=978-0-7181-1617-0|page=279}} 13. ^{{cite book|last=Hill|first=Lee |title=A Grand Guy: The Art And Life of Terry Southern|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PzJtFBXwBsEC&pg=PA135|year=2010|publisher=HarperCollins|isbn=978-0-06-201283-8|page=135}} 14. ^{{cite web | last=Mitford | first=Jessica | title=My Short and Happy Life As a Distinguished Professor | website=The Atlantic | date=1 October 1974 | url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1974/10/my-short-and-happy-life-as-a-distinguished-professor/5320/ | accessdate=12 September 2016}} 15. ^CD Baby: JESSICA MITFORD: Decca and the Dectones 16. ^Patricia Holt, "Jessica Mitford Does the Beatles", SF Gate, 2 February 1995. 17. ^"Maya Angelou & Jessica Mitford: 'There Is a Moral to It All'" {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140802200919/http://www.dqydj.com/prod2.htm |date=2 August 2014 }}, "Don't Quit Your Day Job" Records. 18. ^An expensive way to go. (The Business of Bereavement), The Economist (US edition), 4 January 1997. 19. ^Herb Caen, "The Mourning Fog", SF Gate, 26 July 1996 20. ^{{YouTube|_fZj6ydAk7k|"Christopher Hitchens interviews Jessica Mitford (1988)"}} 21. ^Fraser, Lindsay, "Harry Potter - Harry and me" {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120205213016/http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2002/1102-fraser-scotsman.html |date= 5 February 2012 }}, The Scotsman, November 2002. 22. ^J. K. Rowling, [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3656769/The-first-It-Girl.html "The first It Girl"], Daily Telegraph, 26 November 2006. 23. ^{{cite news| url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/from-homer-to-orwell-david-bowies-100-favourite-books-revealed-8851127.html | location=London | work=The Independent | first=Adam | last=Sherwin | title=From Homer to Orwell: David Bowie's 100 favourite books revealed | date=1 October 2013}} External links
23 : 1917 births|1996 deaths|20th-century British women writers|American memoirists|British communists|Communist women writers|Daughters of barons|Deaths from cancer in California|Deaths from lung cancer|English emigrants to the United States|English expatriates in the United States|English journalists|English memoirists|English socialites|English women writers|Guggenheim Fellows|Mitford family|People from Gloucestershire|People from West Oxfordshire District|Persons involved with death and dying|Women memoirists|Writers from California|Writers from the San Francisco Bay Area |
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