The New Yorker, December 2025
Growing up, I never had a sister, but I always wanted one—or many. Reading alone in my room, I imagined myself into tight-knit literary sororities: the Bennets, the Marches, the Dashwoods. These packs had their problems—petty squabbles, broken confidences, burnt hair—but I envied their intimacy and loyalty. It was the gang first, the world second. Beyond the precincts of fiction, of course, the world has a way of meddling with such bonds. There is perhaps no better example than the Mitford sisters, the six daughters of one of England’s most peculiar aristocratic families, whose radically divergent lives—two became fascists, one became a communist, one became a model aristocrat, one wrote novels skewering the bourgeoisie, and one retreated into cultivated solitude—have riveted the public for more than a century. I first learned about the family in college, when I encountered “Hons and Rebels,” a memoir by Jessica (Decca) Mitford, the second youngest of the group. Written in arch, inhalable prose, it begins as a story about the joy of having sisters and ends with the deep pain of losing them to irreconcilable differences. It was the first book that left me grateful to be my parents’ only daughter.
