Wait for Me!: Memoirs »

Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, is the sister of Nancy, Pamela, Tom, Diana, Unity, and Jessica Mitford. She is a past president of the Royal Agricultural Society of England and of the Royal Smithfield Club. She is the author of Counting My Chickens.

Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, is the youngest of the famously witty brood that includes the writers Jessica and Nancy, who wrote when Deborah was born, “How disgusting of the poor darling to go and be a girl.” Deborah’s effervescent memoir, Wait for Me!, chronicles her remarkable life, from an eccentric but happy childhood in the Oxfordshire countryside, to tea with Adolf Hitler and her controversially political sister Unity in 1937, to her marriage to the second son of the Duke of Devonshire. Her life would change utterly with his unexpected inheritance of the title and vast estates after the wartime death of his brother, who had married Kick Kennedy, the beloved sister of John F. Kennedy. Her friendship with that family would last through triumph and tragedy. Wait for Me!, with its intense warmth and charm, is a unique portrait of an age, and an unprecedented look at the rhythms of life inside one of the great aristocratic families of England. It is irresistible reading, and will join the shelf of Mitford classics to delight readers for years to come.

Library Journal

The author, whose full name is Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, now 90 years old, is the youngest and last surviving of the Mitford sisters, made famous in Nancy Mitford's thinly fictionalized comic novels, especially The Pursuit of Love. The six sisters included two who became fascists (Unity and Diana), a communist (Jessica), a duchess (Deborah), and two best-selling authors (Nancy and, again, Jessica). Deborah Mitford's affable memoir reads like the bonus voice-over DVD commentary—the "movie" here being Nancy's uproarious novels. To make proper sense of Wait for Me!, the uninitiated may first need to read The Pursuit of Love. But don't expect Nancy Mitford's ironic view of the British aristocracy; "I have always voted Conservative," writes Deborah Mitford, "and would never do otherwise." The usually genial author reserves harshest judgment for her writing sisters Jessica and Nancy while offering passes to Diana and Unity, great admirers of Hitler ("many other girls...were swept up in the movement"). VERDICT The book palls when the sisters grow up, and it ceases to serve as a gloss on Nancy Mitford's novels. Yet all acolytes of the Mitford sisters will want to read what will probably be the last firsthand account of their youth.—Stewart Desmond, New York