Hons and Rebels: W&N Essentials

Jessica Mitford (1917ߝ1996) was the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, and she and her five sisters and one brother grew up in isolation on their parents’ Cotswold estate. Rebelling against her family’s hidebound conservatism, Mitford became an outspoken socialist and, with her second cousin and husband-to-be Esmond Romilly, ran away to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Romilly was killed in World War II, and Mitford moved to America, where she married the lawyer and political activist Robert Treuhaft. A brilliant muckraking journalist, Mitford was the author of, among other works, a memoir of her youth, Hons and Rebels; a study of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death; and Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business. She died at the age of seventy-eight while working on a follow-up to The American Way of Death, for which, with characteristic humor, she proposed the title “Death Warmed Over.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949ߝ2011) was a British-American journalist and social critic. Known for his confrontational style and contrarian views on a range of social issues, Hitchens was a frequent contributor to The Nation, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. Hitchens recounts his struggle with esophageal cancer in Mortality, which was published in 2012.

"More than an extremely amusing autobiography…she has evoked a whole generation. Her book is full of the music of time."
— Sunday Times

"Stunning. Reads like extravagantly mannered fiction, except that it is all fabulously true…Miss Mitford is at once touching and wildly funny, and there is not one of her highly coloured characters that is not violently alive and uncomfortably kicking."
— Tatler

"…the story of Jessica Mitford’s struggles makes tumultous and rewarding reading, and I recommend it heartily."
— Elizabeth Janeway, The New York Times

"[Mitford] has a most unusual talent for recapturing the past….There is a feeling of immediacy, as if it were all being written on the spot, at the time, by the teen-ager it was happening to. It is a fascinating book."
— New York Herald Tribune

"The admitted 'rich vein of lunacy' in the Mitford family apparently has done nothing to dim the brilliance of its members among whom Jessica must be included. Although there’s a strong undercurrent of seriousness throughout the book, it’s submerged under downright hilariousness, crackling brash humor and enchanting turns-of-the-phrase."
— San Francisco Chronicle

"Jessica Mitford (the fifth of the Mitford daughters) has brought a whole generation back to life in her autobiography….She tells the whole story of her rebellion…with engaging frankness and a spirited, often humorous, enthusiasm." — Richard McLaughlin, Springfield Republican

"Jessica tells her tale with girlish gush, brilliantly preserved a generation after the events…"
— Time