There are certain families that will forever fascinate us. The Kennedys. The Hiltons. The Kardashians. And, over in England, there are the Mitfords.
Moneyed members of the British aristocracy, David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Bowles spawned six daughters who each led remarkably bold lives and ascended to worldwide fame — and white-hot scandal — as they rebelled against the strictures of a sexist time. (Their father, for instance, refused to send them to school.)
Each Mitford sister was comically different from the rest in a sitcom-level setup that would feel like fiction if it wasn’t true. Nancy was an acclaimed, bestselling novelist; Diana caused an uproar when she left her husband for a right-wing leader; Unity embraced fascism and headed to Germany to stalk Hitler; Pamela was a chicken expert; Jessica took up the communist cause and moved to America; and Deborah became a duchess, managing one of England’s most beautiful estates.
The clan has been the subject of articles, novels and even a musical, plus a few books, including historian Mary S. Lovell’s weighty bestseller “The Sisters.” Now, Lovell’s epic has been turned into a charming TV series; “Outrageous” (the first two episodes are now on BritBox) brings new vigour to the tale of one of the most fascinating families in history.
The show is the perfect conduit for issues running hot in 2025: what do you do, for example, when your beloved family member goes alt-right? But its greatest appeal lies in its cheeky ode to the bonds of sisterhood, as well as the visual feast of just how beautiful life could be for the elite existing in the surreal liminal space of interwar Britain’s rolling countryside.
“There’s a sort of fascination with that way of life,” Joanna Vanderham (Diana) shared in a virtual pre-premiere interview. “It doesn’t really exist anymore.”
The gardens! The lounges! The riverside picnics! The clothes! Oh, my, the clothes! The sisters were as chic as they were trail-blazing, wearing the hell out of a wide variety of 1930s fashion, and “Outrageous” costume designer Claire Collins (in tandem with “Peaky Blinders” hair and makeup maestro Laura Schiavo) beautifully captures the high glamour of their ball gowns and society silks, as well as the more homespun ensembles of both activist workwear, and the tweed and wool hand-me-downs worn by a family with six daughters and ever dwindling means.
Strolling the grounds of Mitford ancestral piles Swinbrook House and Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire today, it is easy to get a sense of how the sisters could revel in an idyllic childhood surrounded by verdant gardens and the cosy overstuffed environs of a stately English home — but also how their personalities and dreams could run so rampant as each yearned to make it out of the country and into the wide world, free of the chafing pastoral chains.
Gathered together with a few visiting journalists around a Duke of Monmouth Pub table on a drizzly day, a little ways from one of the show’s sets at Exeter College in Oxford, “Outrageous” writer Sarah Williams confessed that she had long been drawn to the sisters’ unique combination of high-born style and down-to-earth stubbornness, and had been dying to do a Mitford project for decades. It was, however, a bit of a hard sell, given how much Mitford content was already out there (and, uh, the whole fascism thing). “It’s a great way of looking at the 1930s through the eyes of six women. It’s an exciting, not a dry historical look at the 1930s, but something about six quite rebellious, transgressive women,” she said.
Then she had to go after Lovell’s book, which had been optioned three times already — and is now perhaps more relevant than ever, given the current political climate, cars set ablaze and all.
Lovell told us how she would make the journey to London to meet Williams and executive producer Matthew Mosley to determine if they were the right fit for adapting her book. One day, she encountered no fewer than three demonstrations between getting off the train and making it to her destination, including one with people waving swastika flags. “This is in London in a weekday, so there is a lot of division and dissension going on in this country; not quite the same, but we don’t live in settled times now,” Lovell said.
“Maybe,” Williams added from across the table, “this will be something of a cautionary tale about the allure of the far right.”
Our coterie of reporters filed into the production trailer to get executive producer Mosley’s take on it. (Yes, he is, coincidentally, related to Diana’s fascist hubby Oswald Mosley, played by Joshua Sasse on the show; Matthew is his great-grandson.) “It’s weird, that kind of cyclical nature of history — it feels like we’re slightly back in that period of conventional institutions feeling dysfunctional and people reaching for extremes, and families being torn apart by ideas,” Mosley said.
He was also stoked about the large number of female characters at the centre of the piece, dubbing their real-life antics “captivating.”
“We know the cartoon version of these characters in many ways, but I think what’s so fascinating about this story, and us being able to do a six-episode drama of a certain period of these people’s lives, is to be able to really get under the skin and see what drew these young women to these really extreme ideas and where that came from in them,” he said. “They just had this incredible conviction from the get-go: ‘This is what I believe and I’m going to pursue it to hell or high water.’”
This strange combination of intense individualism and aristocratic bloodline remains irresistible for many. “Their celebrity partly came from the fact that they were aristocrats, but also the extreme things that they did made them more and more and more famous, and more and more in the headlines,” Mosley said.
“That’s partly what the show is exploring: it’s hard to put your finger on any one thing (that made them that way) because so many aspects of their upbringing were shared by other people, but I think there was something about this family, these parents, these children, the fact they were all incredibly incredible individualists, with this huge desire to carve out their niche and be different.”
The show itself also feels different, fresher. Dare we use the term Mitfordish?
The mission going into “Outrageous,” according to Williams’ edict: “I don’t want this to be another show where it’s full of women in bias-cut silk dresses and wavy hair.” And so “Outrageous” opens with the family at a raucous pool party, sisters catapulting into the water. Right away you know: this ain’t your usual period drama. Bright tongue-in-cheek surtitles enhance the playful vibe (after the paterfamilias bans his daughters from seeing his disgraced eldest, for example, a visit to her estate is announced with “Diana’s Forbidden Residence” in giant Technicolor letters).
“It feels really vibrant, really colourful. With period dramas — especially the (ones featuring the) upper class and the aristocracy — you see them with a stiff upper lip, very controlled and very posh,” according to Zoe Brough, who plays Jessica, a.k.a. Decca, in a pre-premiere virtual interview. “I think this family show another side of that world where they are actually very wild. They’re left to their own devices, they have holes in their clothes.”
The wild family experienced so much: dizzying privilege, shrinking wealth, terrible scandal, massive success, horrible heartbreak. But they made their mark. (Even the short three years Nancy worked at a London bookshop are commemorated, we saw, by a heritage plaque affixed to the edifice.)
The last Mitford sister died a decade ago, rejoining her siblings at last. Four of them are buried in Swinbrook at St. Mary’s Church, a 13th-century building that endures, just like their family legacy. Wandering among the tombstones, many memorials are now worn and no longer legible, the biography and accomplishments of those buried beneath lost to time. The elements might one day render the epitaphs of Nancy, Diana, Unity and Pamela the same.
But the Mitfords will never be forgotten.
