Diana Mosley
Anne de Courcy Chatto & Windus, 432pp, £20
ISBN 1856192423
The story of Diana Mosley's life has been told so many times that its major episodes can be summarised as follows: Diana, aristocratic beauty and sister of the novelist Nancy Mitford, leaves husband for the married man and fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; 1930s British society is scandalised at blatant adultery; during the Second World War Diana and Mosley, still unrepentant fascists but by now married, are imprisoned without trial; after the war, they are released but some similarly aristocratic types don't want to talk to them any more.
To add spice to this story, Diana came from a notoriously eccentric family and her sisters, Jessica and Unity, were just as mad as she was. Wealth and influence ensured that their mental quirks remained hidden by their espousal of dangerously extremist political causes. Unity was in love with Hitler, Jessica with communism. Only the eldest sister, Nancy, comes out with any dignity, having produced some of the classic novels and biographies of the 20th century. She was also quite an effective letter-writer. At the outbreak of war she wrote to the British security services about her sister Diana: "She is a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist admirer of Hitler (whom, oddly enough, Mosley personally detests)."
From the first page of Anne de Courcy's biography it is clear what has driven her to exhume a life that has been written so many times. She accuses her subject's father, David Freeman-Mitford, of an "oriental paranoia" in dealing with his daughters' suitors. The allusion speaks to a readership for whom casual racism is a by-product of snobbery. De Courcy's other books include a biography of Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, a life of the Curzon sisters and 1939: the last season, which re-creates the social life of debutantes on the threshold of war. There is clearly a pattern here. But, to her credit, she uses her knowledge to provide a textured and expert portrayal of the milieu in which Mosley mixed and the childhood that shaped her.
Freeman-Mitford provided a kind of "emotional quicksand" that tested his children's nerves. Diana sought his approval and challenged his fickleness simultaneously. She was his favourite, inheriting his "singleness of purpose so undeviating as to be at times both ruthless and blinkered". She and Unity described "Farve" as "one of Nature's fascists". One of the lessons she learnt at his knee was that the best recourse she had for expressing her unschooled intelligence was through a powerful man. And the only escape from her childhood home was marriage.
She married at 18 to the worshipful, winsome and rather weedy Bryan Guinness. She had two children with him but sparks flew when she met Mosley, whose greatest gift, according to de Courcy, was "the ability to create in his hearers the sense that anything was possible". De Courcy goes on to describe him as "magnificent, six feet two inches tall, upright, hard and fit". What was clear to everyone was that he was impatient for power, so impatient that he left every political party he joined in order to form his own. A little learning is a dangerous thing and Diana's lack of education and thraldom to domineering men meant there could be only one course of action open to her, and that was to follow "the Leader", as she called her beloved. "My idea of the future was him," so she left dippy Bryan for Oswald the stud.
De Courcy would have done well to examine her subject's motives more closely. This act of breaking a social taboo could also be read as an attempt to escape from an unfulfilling marriage and gain her independence, much as she did it for the love of Mosley. It would be in character that her self-reliance and stubbornness would fortify her against disapproval. It would also explain why she never felt the need to explain or excuse herself.
Diana learned little from her subsequent time in prison or from being ostracised. Until her death, she remained dogged in her support of Hitler and her husband. Sylvia Plath, another victim of the literary body-snatchers, could have had Mosley in mind when she wrote in her poem "Daddy": "Every woman adores a Fascist". A woman who adored Hitler as well as Mosley was one seeking an author- itarian father figure with a flair for violence. But with her arrogant disregard for others' feelings or points of view, Diana Mosley proved to be just as sinister as "a man in black with a Mein Kampf look".
Lilian Pizzichini is the author of Dead Men's Wages (Picador)
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