December 9, 2025

Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me, by Mimi Pond

My own Mitford history began more than 20 years ago when I lived in England and read Mary Lovell’s biography, The Mitford Girls, launching an infatuation that would lead to many more books (the collected letters, the sisters’ own books [but not Diana’s, yikes, a bridge too far], and a pilgrimmage by coach to Chatsworth House once when I was actually quite ill and would end up lying down among the the sheep poo.

The obsession has worn off in recent years—does one need to be young to be dazzled by Mitfords? Perhaps!—but Mimi Pond’s exquisite graphic biography/memoir DO ADMIT: THE MITFORD SISTERS AND ME takes me right back there. To discovering the wonders of their story with all the twists and tragedy; the charm of English aristocratic eccentricity (from a distance, at least); the way they were like The Spice Girls or Little Women in their suggestion of a range of characters available to girls (the rural one! The fascist one!); the compelling nature of their own self-mythology (the nicknames! the lore!); the idea of women with their own agency (for better and for worse!) and suggestion that a woman’s place in history matters.

Pond brings the storied sisters to live in her exuberant illustrations, and weaves their own stories in with her own as a teen growing up in 1960s’ California, ever so far from the storied world of the Mitfords, and the real question is just why they meant so much to her, somebody whose life would never be remotely like theirs. But for Pond, like me, and so many others, it was the promise they offered of the various ways a woman’s life could go, some more sordid than others (Diana spent WWII in the Holloway Prison for Women due to her fascist tendencies, and she wasn’t even the Mitford most primed in that direction!), all of them unfailingly interesting, sometimes inexplicably so.

My favourite thing about Pond’s book has been introducing my daughter to the Mitford sisters through it. “Read this book,” I insisted, forcing it on her, and she was annoyed at first, as she is when I insist anything, and she had a hard time reading the cursive. “I don’t get it,” she kept saying at first. “What’s the point of this? They’re not even interesting. I don’t get it—” And then suddenly she stopped, and became incapable of putting the book down, and that’s exactly what I mean. And now she’s dazzled too.