elegantly dressed Jessica Mitford

Jessica Mitford with her second husband, Bob Treuhaft

I know, I know: if you're talking about elegantly dressed Mitfords you think you deserve, at the very least, Nancy, if not some astonishing family photograph of the 1910s on a spreading lawn (all the young gels also in spreading lawn), or even some morbid picture of Unity, who shot herself for Hitler's sake... After all, Jessica is hardly known as the glamorous one: as her quip goes, & I paraphrase from memory here, "Nancy is dressed by Dior; I am dressed by JC Penney."

Jessica - known as Decca to her friends - admitted that she never noticed how things looked, but nonetheless she did get in trouble with the Communist party in California for wearing hats and gloves as she handed out their leaflets from door to door in the suburbs. "What on earth is the point of Communism," she said when hauled up on it, "if it means no one can wear nice hats?"

There are more anecdotes about this glorious woman than I have space to tell (though I might just allude to the game she invented as a child, gently shaking her father's arm as he drank his tea - preparing him, as she said, for the palsy he would surely be developing before long). Or describe how, when she eloped with her cousin Esmond Romilly and went to live in Rotherhithe, she was so clueless she had no idea how to wash the dishes, and she washed, rinsed, dried and put away each dish in its turn. To this day every time I see or hear mention of Rotherhithe I think of Jessica Mitford at 17, so brave and passionate... so plucky yet incompetent... it is a thrilling story.

Esmond went off to fight in Spain and got killed. Their infant daughter Constanza died of meningitis in America not long afterwards. Unity, of course - the sister Decca had been closest to in childhood - shot herself and never recovered. The rift with (another sister) Diana Mosley was never healed. And what did our Decca do? She brushed herself off, remarried (very happily) and got on with it.

She was a woman of facets, inner steel and great humour - three essentials for elegance, I think.

The best thing you can do is read her childhood memoir, Hons and Rebels. (The h is pronounced; far from being anything to do with "honourables," it is a corruption of "hens.")

And here, for your delectation, are two very different reviews of her letters, now out in enormous (and garish; who designed that ugly cover?) hardback.

1. Victoria Glendinning
2. JK Rowling