The Boston Globe, November 2025
One of the first things that struck Carla Kaplan about Jessica Mitford was her voice – not in speaking but on the page. “She has one of the most recognizable voices in the history of English writing. You read anything by Decca [Mitford’s lifelong nickname] and you instantly know it’s her,” says Kaplan, whose book “Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford” (Harper) comes out this week Mitford is known today mostly for her books The American Way of Death, ” a keen-eyed expose of the funeral business published in 1963, and her 1960 family memoir “Hons and Rebels,” about her aristocratic English upbringing among a brood of dazzling siblings.
