Mitford, Diana (1910—)

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Mitford, Diana (1910—)

English socialite and wife of Fascist leader Oswald Mosley. Name variations: Lady Diana Mosley. Born on June 17, 1910; daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Bowles; sister of Nancy Mitford (1904–1973), Jessica Mitford (1917–1996), Deborah Mitford (b. 1920), and Unity Mitford (1914–1948); married Bryan Guinness (later Lord Moyne), in January 1929 (divorced 1934); married Sir Oswald Mosley (a politician and founder of the British Union of Fascists), in 1936 (died 1980); children: (first marriage) Jonathan Guinness; Desmond Guinness; (second marriage) Alexander Mosley; Max Mosley.

Diana Mitford was born in England in 1910, the daughter of Baron and Baroness Redesdale and the sister of Nancy Mitford, Jessica Mitford, Deborah Mitford , and Unity Mitford . Diana grew up enthralled by the books of Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and J.B.S. Haldane, about which she noted, "I loved them for their wit and irreverence and their rejection of accepted standards." She married an heir to the Guinness brewing fortune before she was 20, and with her husband was active in the London social scene of the young and wealthy upper crust. (Evelyn Waugh, who was a close friend, dedicated his satire Vile Bodies to Mitford and her husband.) At 23, she met Oswald Mosley, a Labour politician who had grown increasingly disaffected with his party and settled on Fascism as the only hope of saving England from its economic woes. Fascism was still a fairly new ideology then, having first come to prominence with Benito Mussolini's rise to power in Italy in 1922, and there were many who found in it a welcome antidote to the abrupt social and economic changes that had roiled the world in the years after World War I. Mitford, too, became a staunch believer, and in the process fell in love with Mosley. Though she had a husband and two young children, and he was both married and a notorious womanizer, she left her family to become his mistress. A few months later, in October 1932, Mosley founded the National Union of Fascists (also known as the British Union of Fascists), soon to become notorious for the violent thuggery of its "black-shirt" members.

Over the next few years Mitford became friendly with Adolf Hitler, whom she greatly admired (though she did not worship him as did her sister Unity), and had no difficulty in accepting the Nazi attitude towards Jews. Mosley's organization also became increasingly anti-Semitic throughout the 1930s, which was in part what led finally to a backlash from the public and from the government. In 1936, following the death of his first wife Cynthia Mosley , Mitford and Mosley married secretly in Berlin at the house of Josef and Magda Goebbels . Hitler attended the ceremony, and gave the newlyweds a framed photograph of himself which they would display proudly for years.

At the start of World War II, Mitford and her husband, who had been spending much of their time in Germany, returned to England. Now a national pariah, Mosley was promptly imprisoned (his union had already been proscribed by the government), and there was some grumbling that his wife remained free. A short time later, having given birth to her son Max some two months before, Mitford was arrested as a "dangerous woman." Along with enemy aliens and various others who were suspect in time of war, she spent over three years (1940–43) in Holloway prison without trial. In 1943, Winston Churchill, who was one of Mitford's cousins, transferred her and her husband to joint house arrest for the remainder of the war. This caused a public outcry, and Jessica Mitford was among those who wanted them sent back to prison. After the war Mitford and Mosley faced many years of vilification, which apparently bothered her not in the least. Though Lady Maud Cunard remained a loyal friend, Diana and her sister Jessica weren't always "on speakers." Mitford's 1977 autobiography A Life of Contrasts, considered a little too "unrepentant" by the British press, only served to renew the public's animosity. In 1980, the year of her husband's death, she also published The Duchess of Windsor, a biography of her friend Wallis Warfield Simpson . The House of Mitford: Portrait of a Family (1984) was written by her eldest son Jonathan Guinness and her granddaughter Catherine Guinness .