The Mitfords and the Illusion of Superiority

"It never occurred to me to be happy with my lot." - Jessica Mitford

The Mitford family

After writing a post about Agatha Christie’s spiritual life two weeks ago, I delved back into the life of Nancy Mitford while reading The Pursuit of Love. Like Christie, Mitford was an Anglican who signed a letter petitioning the Pope to preserve the Traditional Latin Mass in the wake of Vatican II.¹ Mitford, like Christie, appreciated the beauty and symbolism of the Mass.

If you aren’t familiar with the Mitford family, suffice it to say that Nancy, a bestselling author, was perhaps the least interesting of the six sisters. I can’t go into depth about the Mitfords without losing the thread of this piece, but they were a genteel but very eccentric English family that produced two notorious Nazis, two bestselling authors, and one revered duchess (one sister preferred to live quietly, and the only son of the family died young). If you’re interested in learning more about the Mitfords, give this piece and the others in the series a read - McKenzie does a great job covering them all, especially my beloved Debo.

What I want to emphasize about the Mitfords here, though, is that they valued “good blood” above all else. It’s for good reason that the Mitford family was said to have inspired the Black family in Harry Potter - both were obsessed with “pure blood,” a distinction that meant everything.²

I was fortunate not to grow up in a family as strange as the Mitfords, but I did spend much of my adolescence and early adulthood in spheres where most people valued the wrong things.

I started prep school at twelve and from there followed the predictable path to a good college, an excellent law school, a clerkship, and an associate position at a white shoe law firm. I made a Cravath Scale salary by 27, became barred in two states, and felt totally lost.

If you are raised to compete, it can feel disorienting when you finally achieve what you spent years chasing. Once I graduated from a prestigious school and landed a coveted job, I felt out of sorts. C.S. Lewis said of worldly desire that “[a]s long as you are governed by [it] you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion; if you succeed there will be nothing left.”³ This was how I felt. I had arrived, but to an empty destination. I was in one sense at the top of the ladder with nothing to do but gaze below at the years that trailed behind me.

I don’t mean to trash “BigLaw.” I met many wonderful people at my former firm, and I had an excellent experience overall. My firm treated me well, and my colleagues were brilliant. Like many Type-A people, though, I struggled to maintain balance in my life in such an intense environment. I was snappy with my husband and useless as a friend because I worked constantly. Worse, the pressure I had long felt to be perfect only intensified.

Luckily, I had my son about two years into my tenure in BigLaw. Once that happened, I knew I had to change.

It felt like whiplash to transition from a hard-charging corporate lawyer closing deals at 2 A.M. at seven months pregnant to a stay-at-home Mom, but I have never regretted it. In fact, I have benefitted immensely from shedding many of the assumptions that governed my life until six months ago.

How does any of this relate to the Mitford sisters? I suppose it is that, like my experience, the lives of the Mitford sisters lend credence to C.S. Lewis’s observations about worldliness. You can hail from one of the most “posh” families in the world and still live an empty life. I think this is why many of the Mitford sisters pursued extreme ideologies - they had no education in virtue, but they were brilliant, so something had to fill the void. I wish that, like her close friend Evelyn Waugh,⁴ Nancy might have accepted Catholicism and truly experienced the Mass she so loved.

As for me, I have found being a stay-at-home mother more challenging in many ways than being a corporate lawyer. Yes, working on $300 million deals is stressful, but as a young associate you are not truly responsible to the client for anything. Someone is there supervising you, ensuring you don’t veer too far from course.

Not so with motherhood. You are entrusted with an immortal soul and it is up to you to steward it. There is nothing the government or your friends or even your own parents can really do for you - you must accept responsibility. In my case, you must also learn to really trust God for the first time.

1. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, “Objective Beauty of the Traditional Latin Mass Evangelizes,” The Catholic Register (8 Jul. 2024), https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/archbishop-cordileone-traditional-latin-mass.

2. Lindsay Romain, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s Strangest Twist May Have Roots in History,” Slate, (8 Aug 2016, 8:32 AM).

3. C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” C.S. Lewis Society of California, https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/.

4. Jeffrey Manley, “Evenlyn Waugh and the Mitfords,” The Mitford Society (26 May 2015), https://themitfordsociety.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/evelyn-waugh-the-mitfords-by-jeffrey-manley/.