Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly – crusaders, chancers, spongers

Even ardent Mitfordians must quake at the sight of yet another biography of the sisterhood. There have been more forests felled in the name of Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah Freeman-Mitford than the Brontë sisters. Jessica alone produced two volumes of memoirs, Hons and Rebels (1960) and A Fine Old Conflict (1977); her collected letters (Decca, 2006) came in at a thumping 700 pages and in 2010, Irrepressible, Leslie Brody’s biography of Jessica’s years in the United States, appeared. ‘Enough already’, one can hear her American sisters cry.

Yet with Churchill’s Rebels, Meredith Whitford, a South Australian author of historical novels, has brought a clear eye and a fresh pen to the early life of Jessica and her first husband, Esmond Romilly. Despite the title, Whitford has, in her very first sentence, set us straight. Esmond was in fact the nephew of Clementine Churchill (his mother, Nellie Romilly, née Hozier, was her sister), not Winston’s, although the latter nobly played the role of uncle to his wayward nephew.