Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now,

and in the third episode I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky. You can find a link in

the description or search close readings wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm joined by Rosemary Hill to talk about a new biography of Jessica Mitford and what she, Jessica, once called the Mitford industry.

Rosemary Hill's most recent book is Times Witness, History in the Age of Romanticism. She's a contributing editor at the LRB and presents London Revisited on the

LRB's Close Readings podcast. Her piece in the latest issue of the paper is a review of Troublemaker,

The Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan. Hello Rosemary and thank you for talking to me

today. Hello Tom. Thank you for asking me.

You write in your piece that the Mitford sister's mother, Lady Reidsdale, once said that whenever she saw a headline beginning, Peer's daughter, she knew it would be one of hers.

So very briefly, I suppose, in case anyone needs reminding, who were the Mitford sisters?

And why were they so often in the headlines?

Well, they were the Reedsdale's daughters.

There was one brother, Tom, of whom not much has ever said. But the daughters were Jessica, who's the subject of this biography, who was generally known as Decker, and who's

referred to as Decker mostly in the book. There was Nancy, who was the novelist and the bright

young thing, great friend of Evelyn Waugh, great letter writer and wit. There was Unity,

who was one of the two fascist sisters. She was the one who became a

great personal friend of Adolf Hitler, and at the outbreak of war attempted suicide. Then there was

...