Jessica Mitford’s Handbag

When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long after that moved to the US where she became a naturalised citizen and joined the Communist Party. The Mitford sisters wrote many books and even more have been written about them, but Carla Kaplan's scholarly new biography of Jessica is a welcome addition to the ‘Mitford industry’, according to Rosemary Hill, because she approaches her subject as an ‘American communist with an unusual background in the English aristocracy’. In this episode, Rosemary joins Thomas Jones to talk about Decca’s eventful life, her work as a civil rights activist and writer, and her complicated relationships with the other Mitfords. When asked whether the bond with her sisters had ‘stood between her and life’s cruel circumstances’, Decca replied: ‘Sisters were life’s cruel circumstances.’ Find further reading on the episode page: Listen and

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Jessica Mitford’s Handbag is an episode from The LRB Podcast by London Review of Books.

This episode is 50:44 long.

This episode was published on Feb 4, 2026.

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