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Diana Mosley - Anna de Courcy

  • Sep. 5th, 2009 at 11:12 PM
literature, writer, book
This book offers a fascinating and controversial life of the 'Mitford girl' who ran away with the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, and was a close friend of Adolf Hitler. Diana Mosley was one of the most fascinating and controversial figures of recent times. For some, she was a cult; for many, anathema. Born in 1910, Diana was the most beautiful and the cleverest of the six Mitford sisters. She was eighteen when she married Bryan Guinness, of the brewing dynasty, by whom she had two sons. After four years, she left him for the fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, and set herself up as Mosley's mistress - a course of action that horrified her family and scandalised society. In 1933, she took her sister Unity to Germany; soon both had met the new German leader, Adolf Hitler. Diana became so close to him that when she and Mosley married in 1936 the ceremony took place in the Goebbels drawing room and Hitler was guest of honour. She continued to visit Hitler until a month before the outbreak of war; and afterwards, for many, years, refused to believe in the reality of the Holocaust. This gripping book is a portrait of both an extraordinary individual and the strange, terrible world of political extremism in the 1930s.

I have been fascinated by the Mitfords for some time, although the more I read about them, the more I am reminded that I would have hated most of them in person. Diana particularly has always been for very many people a hugely controversial figure.  However controversial she was, she was also fascinating.  As a Mitford alone she would be  fascinating, but add in 1930's extremism, Hitler the drama of war, imprisonment, and a 45 year marriage to an infamous politician such as Oswald Mosley, and you get a biography that is really compelling. Many Mitford expoits in this books were familiar to me as I had read about them in other books, not that I minded reading about them again.   This was the first time I had read so much about Diana, her obsession with Hitler and his policies, her marriage to Mosley, and their imprisonment during the war, under a new hastily written amendment to the emergency powers Bill, was fantastically readable and hard to put down at times.

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