Leslie Brody has won the PEN Center USA West prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and several awards for her playwriting. She is the author of the memoir Red Star Sister and is a professor at the University of Redlands. She lives in Redlands, California.
Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford
by Leslie Brody
eBook
-
ISBN-13:
9781582438559
- Publisher: Counterpoint Press
- Publication date: 09/10/2010
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 400
- File size: 503 KB
Available on NOOK devices and apps
Want a NOOK? Explore Now
From the author of Red Star Sister. “An excellent biography. Brody has made the world a better place by telling [Mitford’s] saga so skillfully” (San Francisco Chronicle).
Admirers and detractors use the same words to describe Jessica Mitford: subversive, mischief-maker, muckraker. J.K. Rowling calls her her “most influential writer.” Those who knew her best simply called her Decca. Born into one of Britain’s most famous aristocratic families, she eloped with Winston Churchill’s nephew as a teenager. Their marriage severed ties with her privilege, a rupture exacerbated by the life she lead for seventy-eight years.
After arriving in the United States in 1939, Decca became one of the New Deal’s most notorious bureaucrats. For her the personal was political, especially as a civil rights activist and journalist. She coined the term frenemies, and as a member of the American Communist Party, she made several, though not among the Cold War witch hunters. When she left the Communist Party in 1958 after fifteen years, she promised to be subversive whenever the opportunity arose. True to her word, late in life she hit her stride as a writer, publishing nine books before her death in 1996.
Yoked to every important event for nearly all of the twentieth century, Decca not only was defined by the history she witnessed, but by bearing witness, helped to define that history.
“Brisk, engaging.” —Wall Street Journal
“A valuable retelling of a provocative life.” —Kirkus Reviews
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
-
- Nobody Said Not to Go: The…
- by Ken Cuthbertson
-
- Orwell: The Life
- by D. J. Taylor
-
- Dylan Thomas: A New Life
- by Andrew Lycett
-
- The Extraordinary Life of A A…
- by Nadia Cohen
-
- Eleanor Marx: A Life
- by Rachel Holmes
-
- Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters
- by Oscar WildeMerlin Holland
-
- Henry James: The Imagination…
- by Fred Kaplan
-
- Ahead of Time: My Early Years…
- by Ruth Gruber
-
- The Kennedy Imprisonment: A…
- by Garry Wills
-
- Writers in America: The Four…
- by Budd Schulberg
-
- What There Is to Say We Have…
- by Suzanne Marrs
-
- The Time of Their Lives: The…
- by Al Silverman
-
- Gore Vidal: A Biography
- by Fred Kaplan
-
- Camus, a Romance
- by Elizabeth Hawes
Recently Viewed
Praise for Irrepressible
"Defying the odds, Leslie Brody has produced an excellent biography. Brody has made the world a better place by telling [Mitford's] saga so skillfully." San Francisco Chronicle
“With passion, commitment, and a keen sense of adventurethe same qualities that defined her famous subjectLeslie Brody presents Jessica ‘Decca’ Mitford as the delightfully complicated character she was: aristocrat, Communist, civil rights activist, mother, author, American dreamer. In brisk but sympathetic prose that will resonate even with those totally unfamiliar with Mitford, Brody traces the fascinating evolution of a woman whose life was shaped by the great political forces of her time, yet who always stayed true to herself and her personal vision. Irrepressible is a great, all-encompassing narrative in the age of niche.” Erin Aubry Kaplan, author of I, The People
“Such a refreshing biography of Decca! What an inspiration Leslie Brody’s calm yet always vivid history should be to young rebellious souls oppressed by the gloomy cul-de-sac into which our national politics have drifted. Here’s the story of a true rebel in the finest traditions of upper-class English women who kicked over the traces. Decca’s journey took her from Republican Spain to Oakland, California. Brody is never better than when describing the energy and idealism of Communists in those vicious postwar years and Decca’s humor and enormous bravery in the face of real physical danger.” Alexander Cockburn
Insightful biography of renowned muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford (1917–1996).
Born into a life of British aristocracy, at age 12 Mitford wrote a letter to a London bank requesting to open a "Running Away Account." Her action, even at such a young age, was emblematic of the life she would lead—that of an outsider, an activist and a hot-blooded liberal from a family with fascist leanings. Brody (Creative Writing/Univ. of Redlands;Red Star Sister: Between Madness and Utopia, 2000) gives full access to Mitford's story, from her first marriage to Winston Churchill's nephew, Esmond Romilly, to her migration from the comforts of England to the exploding social scene of New York City in the 1940s. The narrative accelerates as Mitford struggles to find solid footing in a foreign land, and the World War II backdrop intensifies after Mitford's husband is discovered missing in action and presumed dead somewhere in the North Sea. After Romilly's death, Mitford's slide to the political left continued upon marrying Civil Rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, who encouraged his wife's passion for activist reporting. Mitford witnessed firsthand the Freedom Riders' beatings in Birmingham, as well as other violent events during the civil-rights movement. Throughout her life, she courted danger while still managing to brush shoulders with royalty. She held chats with William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, while across the sea, her family dined with Hitler. "Had tea with Hitler," her mother reported. "He is very agreeable and has surprisingly good manners." The political differences between Mitford and her family were exacerbated by Joseph McCarthy's HUAC trials, which called upon Mitford and her husband to testify, an indignity that would only further solidify her role as a resilient muckraker long into the future.
A valuable retelling of a provocative life.