Society's celebrity siblings

Buy this book online from Amazon.co.uk

The Mitford Girls! The Mitford Girls/I love them for their sins," wrote John Betjeman, long before the Mitford family - a brace of idiosyncratic parents, six beautiful daughters and one son, Tom, became a kind of minor heritage industry.

The novels of Nancy, the political affiliations of Diana (who married the fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley), Unity (who was entranced by Hitler), and Jessica (who ran away from home to become a Communist) and the businesslike charm of Deborah, who married the Duke of Devonshire and turned his intractable family pile, Chatsworth, into the profitable envy of her impecunious peers - these were the stuff of popular legend, decades before the private lives of PR-hyped "celebrities" became daily newspaper fodder. " Whenever I see the words "Peer's daughter" in a headline, I know it's going to be something about one of you children," remarked their mother, plaintively.

On such a rich source of anecdote, a hungry swarm of biographers has settled. Nevertheless, the Mitfords, with the exception of Nancy (and perhaps Diana), are minor figures - footnotes to history - and you might think their story perilously close to being exhausted. But evidently not quite, for someone called Mary S Lovell - a veteran of five previous biographies, from Amelia Earhart to Richard and Isabel Burton - has emerged to give The Mitford Girls a fresh twist. Her subtitle spells out her objective: to write "The biography of an extraordinary family".

This seems like a fairly good idea. The Mitford sisters' lives may be wearisomely familiar, but the family dynamic that produced that amazing crop of children remains comparatively unexplored: the subject, potentially, of a study as thoughtful and perceptive as Nicholas Mosley's astonishing two-volume account of his father's life and milieu.

Mary Lovell's introduction gives a vivid sense of the book to come. "When I began researching, I suppose I had in mind ... a frothy biography of life in Society between the wars," she writes. Happy the woman, one may think, who begins whipping up a literary cappuccino, only to find herself elbow-deep in something altogether more bloody and intense.

But Lovell seems to have struggled against her destiny: "This is not a political book," she protests. "For reasons of space ... I have had to resist the temptation to explore a multiplicity of players on the world stage ... from Winston Churchill and General de Gaulle ... to Maya Angelou, Salman Rushdie and Jon Snow." Crikey. As Fabrice says, in Nancy Mitford's Pursuit of Love, "C'est une rÈsistance magnifique, madame."

Then again, perhaps incuriosity comes naturally to Ms Lovell. She tells a couple of anecdotes - about meeting Pamela Jackson (nÈe Mitford) "at a dinner party in Gloucestershire" where Lovell unluckily failed to clock her Mitford credentials, though Pamela "was interested in my hunter, Flashman, and his breeding"; then there is the sad tale of her missed encounters with Jessica: "I bitterly regret ... that I did not make time to take up her several kind invitations to visit ...".

The faux self-depreciation, subliminal assurances that she is no mere grubby wordsmith but the Gloucestershire-dwelling, hunter-owning social equal of her subjects, and the Hello!-style cadences of her prose, in which archives are "dusty", homes "lovely", comments on daily life "irreverent" and "hilarious", episodes "traumatic", storms " horrendous" and hearts "lost" in a moment, induce a certain sense of foreboding in the reader which is cruelly realised in the text.

Lovell's agenda, which seems to be a worthwhile desire to explore the complicated network of Mitford sibling relationships, while simultaneously rescuing the Mitford parents from their unkind caricatures in Nancy's novels as Aunt Sadie and Uncle Matthew, is hampered both by her apparent unwillingness to offend the two surviving Mitford sisters, Deborah and Diana, whose versions of events she seems disinclined to question, and about whom there are some blushmakingly sycophantic passages; and by her own writing technique - her pedestrian prose style, patchwork use of sources which she seems unable or unwilling to analyse or question, and maddening habit of consigning to footnotes information that ought to have been incorporated into her text.

The whole thing adds up to a vertiginous sense of an author barely in charge of a book she has neither the inclination nor the ability to write. Your Mitford-fancying auntie will doubtless welcome a copy for Christmas. But when she is seeking a subject for her next biography, Lovell might do well to follow her original, frothy instincts.