This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

Welcome to a very special episode of Noble Blood.

I am so thrilled to be talking today with Carla Kaplan, the historian, writer, professor,

author of the incredible new nonfiction book, Troublemaker, the fierce, unruly life of Jessica

Mitford. If you are someone who, like me, has been fascinated with the Mitford Sisters,

this is absolutely going to be a book you're going to want to read.

I feel like I learned so much. I had been circling information about the Midford sisters because

they're just fascinating. And this book is just so brilliantly, comprehensively done, even though

it focuses really on Jessica or Deca Mitford. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. What a

pleasure to be here today. So just to start, for audience members who maybe aren't familiar with who

the Mitford sisters are, who are they? Why do so many people write and talk about them?

And why has it been going on for literally one

a few years now? So it has been sometimes called Mitford Mania. Jessica Midford, the sister about whom

I write, called it somewhat derisively, the Mitford industry. And there have been waves of Mittfordiana,

and we are in one. So there is my book. There is

Peter Sussman's incredible book of Jessica Midford's letters. There is Mimi Pons-Dou-Admit, which is a

graphic group biography of all the sisters. There is in Great Britain now a biography of their

mother, just appropriately simply called Move.

There was just a play in England, which I unfortunately didn't get to see, called Party Girls.

...