Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford (11 September 1917 -- 22 July 1996) was an English author, journalist, civil rights activist and political campaigner, who was one of the Mitford sisters. She became an American citizen in 1944. Mitford, the sixth of seven children, 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 never-the-less was widely read. Though her sisters Unity and Diana were well-known British supporters of Hitler and her father was described as being "one of nature's fascists", Jessica (always known as "Decca") renounced her privileged background at an early age and became an adherent of communism. She was known as the "red sheep" of the family. At age 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. 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 December 20, 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 autobiographical novel, Hons and Rebels.[1] In 1939, Romilly and Mitford emigrated to the United States. They traveled around, working odd jobs, perpetually short of money.[1] 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 ("the Donk" or "Dinky") Romilly on 9 February 1941.[3] Her husband went missing in action on 30 November 1941, on his way back from a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Mitford 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. She became an American citizen in 1944.[4] There the couple had two sons: Nicholas born 1944 (who was killed in 1955 when hit by a bus), and Benjamin, born 1947. Mitford approached her motherhood in a spirit of "benign neglect", described by her children as "matter-of-fact" and "not touchy-feely".[5] 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. The author Christopher Hitchens expressed his admiration for Jessica Mitford and praised Hons and Rebels.[14] J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, reviewed Mitford's book of letters, Decca, in the Sunday Telegraph in 2006.[15] Rowling stated in 2002, "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."[16] In 2013 the singer David Bowie named The American Way of Death as one of his favourite books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Mitford

• published: 17 May 2014
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