Deborah Mitford

The last of the famous Mitford siblings, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, has passed away.
The six Mitford daughters and one brother were probably more witty together than considered individually.  Nevertheless, two writers, Jessica and Nancy, and two extremes, Diana (married to Oswald Mosley) and Unity (to national socialism), made for a most unusual "clan."
Behind the veneer the dysfunctions had a free hand.

Today all of them look strangely distant.  If some of their attitudes had not been so extreme, they might well have remained obscure or marginally eccentric.  They fit more in Noel Coward or Cecil Beaton's worlds than in any more pertinent narrative.  We are only still occasionally mildly interested because the sum of those lives became a plot, at the same time tenuous and bizarre. Their often nonchalant choices were consumed like a gin and tonic, almost at random.

The Duchess, chatelaine of the legendary Chatsworth, was as close to royalty and the grandees of the world as she was to her chickens.  It is hard to tell whom she preferred.  She joins now the ranks of Evangeline Bruce and Diana Cooper.  Her children and great-grandchildren will surely feel the absence of the last torch carrier.  Her strength lay in her cunning, disguised under the mantle of an adopted fragility.

Maybe we are reminiscent because the rather drab today looks so devoid of irrelevant non sequiturs.