Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me

by Mimi Pond

Mimi Pond crafts a gorgeous, dazzling biography of the Mitford Sisters

Born with pedigrees but without the pocketbooks to match, The Mitfords were certainly no strangers to lies, intrigue, or scandal. Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. All six sisters were weaned on their family’s well-documented upper class a ne’er do well would-be entrepreneur father; a stern, stiff-upper-lipped mother; a revolving door of governesses of varying propriety, all against the backdrop of a crumbling estate falling into disrepair.

The sisters grew from cloistered turn-of-the-century country girls into debutantes who would marry into political influence—for better or worse. Is it any wonder that a young, working class Mimi in Southern California becomes enamored with The Mitfords’ downright fanciful rich-and-famous lifestyle? This charming, inventively cartooned, and lovingly researched biography captures the dramatic, over-the-top antics of high society’s strongest personalities as they rubbed elbows with some of history’s most infamous fascists and communists.

Pond’s genius for classic cartooning in the vein of the Vanity Fair caricature and the satirical illustrations of Charles Addams brings the aesthetic decadence of the 1920s and ‘30s to life with effortless aplomb, warts and all.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, Biography, Comics, History, Memoir, Family

452 pages, Hardcover

First published September 16, 2025

About the author

Mimi Pond is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. She has created comics for the Los Angeles Times, Seventeen magazine, National Lampoon, and many other publications. Television credits include writing the first full-length episode of The Simpsons, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”, and episodes for the shows Designing Women and Pee Wee’s Playhouse. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the painter Wayne White.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let’s go on a wildly whirling whitewater plunge through the terrible traumas of the twentieth century in the preposterously posh company of the six enormously entertaining Mitford sisters. This is a brilliant cheeky chunky (it’s big) funny graphic biography of all of them. It might be my book of the year although there are some strong contenders. There is a cast of dozens and dozens. Six sisters, two parents, many spouses and cohabitees, children, and various Famous People swirl through the pages as the sisters ricochet around the world from the 1920s to the 1980s. They rarely slow down.

There are walk-on parts for Hitler! Winston Churchill! Lyndon Johnson! William Faulkner! John F Kennedy! Nancy sings “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”!

Mimi Pond knows a great quote when she sees one :

Winston Churchill, a man who looked like every baby ever, once described Charles de Gaulle as “a female llama, surprised in her bath”



SOME MITFORD SISTERS

The Fascists :

Diana married a guy named Oswald Moseley who was head of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s – yes, they were never very popular. They were married in a private ceremony at the house of JOSEPH GOEBBELS. And Adolf himself was one of the guests . Back in Britain, when war was declared they were put into preventative detention as enemy sympathisers. Because they were being held without trial they could wear their own clothes. This led to a situation in 1940 whereby Diana is wearing a luxurious fur coat looking out of her prison bars while being bombed by her friends the Nazis. Mimi Pond comments : “That’s the kind of irony money can’t buy”.



Unity developed an obsession about Hitler too. She went to Germany in the 30s and wheedled her way into Hitler’s inner circle. Eventually he became a bit smitten too – she was six feet tall, blond, you know, extremely Aryan – but also, she would tell him all the gossip other people were scared to tell him. She told anyone who would listen that if war broke out between Britain and Germany she would shoot herself. When it did, she went to a park and shot herself. She didn’t die but she wasn’t quite herself after that, not with a bullet lodged in her brain.

The Communist :

Jessica : decided to live in the USA where she got involved with every left-wing cause going and therefore found herself before the HUAC. In 1963 she wrote The American Way of Death which was a big bombshell and turned the funeral industry upside down. (I must read that one.) She was a live wire campaigning journalist.



The Author :

Nancy : she wrote The Pursuit of Love in 1945 which is hilarious – a must read! And she wrote loads more and was a big bestseller. She’s the one you’ve heard of.

The Duchess :

Deborah : she married the second son of a Duke – he wasn’t going to inherit anything but then his older brother died and his father died and he was Duke of Devonshire. Deborah found herself in charge of Chatsworth House with its numberless rooms (over 200) and six or so other stately piles dotted around England. Chatsworth was in a neglected, parlous state at the time and she resurrected the whole thing, restored everything to pristine Jane Austen-style perfection. In 2010 at the age of 90 she published the first of three memoirs. She was the last one to die, in 2014.

All of this is just to mention a few bullet points.

So for all readers who love cracking good biographies in graphic form, this is a must read.

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Mitford sisters were a mash-up of the Kardashians and the Kennedys playing Real Housewives of England in their English and French manors with World War II and the Cold War playing out in the background.

Mimi Pond does her best to communicate her enthusiasm for the siblings by occasionally injecting her childhood self into the narrative, but I could find little reason to care about this group of aristocratic debutantes and socialites. Some of them became writers of books, but not books that I've ever really heard of. And a scary percentage of them were pro-fascist worshippers of Hitler, so, you know, fuck them.

This book gets off to a shaky start as Pond seems to assume the reader will have familiarity with the family and fails to firmly establish their (in)significance before dumping us into their lives and jumping around in a scattershot fashion between the sisters and their confusing collection of nicknames. It doesn't help that the reading order of the captions gets a little murky a few too many times without borders to section the panels off from one another.

About the time I was settling into the groove of the book's style, I was also realizing just how unimportant these women were in the larger scheme of things despite Pond's protestations to the contrary.

The real drawback for me in the end though is that this is a thick monster that took forever to slog through at 30 to 60 minutes a day over the course of a week. I have nothing but regret for the time lost to what is essentially an overlong gossip column.


(Best of 2025 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:

• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2025
• Publishers Weekly 2025 Graphic Novel Critics Poll
• NPR's Books We Love 2025: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels

This book made the WaPo and PW lists.)

[Tatiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

A chaotic, disorganized book about chaotic family, where EVERY MEMBER was drawn to extremes. An interesting bunch of characters, but I wish I learned about them via a better medium.

[Alli Cadle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could have read a hundred more unnumbered prussian blue pages. Obsession is the heart of the book—Pond’s obsession with the Mitfords and the sisters’ own deep and disparate obsessions ranging from chickens to Hitler. They were fascinating, complicated, well-connected people who participated in history and in their own mythmaking. And the nicknames!

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm dead center in the middle of the hypothetical Venn diagram showing an overlap of people with an interest in the Mitford sisters and of adults who read graphic novels, so I had really high hopes for this book. I didn't like it as much as I expected, because I really struggled with the layout. Almost every page is an info-graphic (as opposed to a series of panels with a narrative), and each of these is cluttered with lines of text of different sizes placed at different angles, and I was constantly struggling to figure out what I should read first, where. The parts about the author's childhood also didn't seem to fit in, but that's a lesser complaint. Despite all this, the Mitford fascination still worked its strange spell, just not as much as I'd hoped.

[Elizabeth A · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully illustrated graphic biography interspersed with memoir tidbits.

I'm new to the Mitford family and these sisters are rather astounding. I learned a lot and plan on reading more about these women.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is visually beautiful, and I suppose it's because I'm getting old and cranky that I want to complain about the font jumping around from tiny to huge and the text being at an angle making it harder to read and being unclear about whether I should read the panels going across or going down. I adore Nancy Mitford's novels and I should probably go ahead and read Daughters and Rebels, but I haven't yet. I learned a fair amount about the Mitford family, but the narrative does jump around in time quite a lot and at the end I found I can't remember which of the Mitford sisters ended up having a relationship with a lesbian in Switzerland (I think) and I feel like I would have to go through the whole thing again to figure it out and it's already overdue at the library, so, no, I won't be doing that. I wish the author had put more about herself and her responses to the Mitford sisters' lives in this, for example, how and when did she discover them? What was that journey like? How obsessed is she and what nutty obsessive things does she do besides put them in a graphic novel? I might read another by this author and I might not.

[Yara El-Soueidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE MITFORD SISTERS WERE WILD AND DECCA WAS THE BEST OF THEM ALL.

[Erik B.K.K. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Who cares about out of touch British aristocracy? Especially when they end up being cuckoo Nazis? I don't.

[Joanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m obsessed.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read a few graphic novels but I think this one is my all time favourite.
There is so much to write about the six Mitford sisters and they are all so different yet fascinating so a graphic novel is a great way to find out about it all as a normal book would be a very weighty tome!
Beautifully illustrated as well and the summaries comparing each sister make it really easy to follow and understand.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit confusing with all the names and nicknames and sometimes it's not clear where to read the text but overall very interesting story. I think watching the series may clarify who is who.

[Maria Almaguer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, those wild Mitford girls! I've read several collective biographies and collections of letters about these six extremely colorful English women who lived in the early to mid twentieth century: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah--they also had one lone brother, but he's not the subject here. The author explores, in aptly whimsical and dramatic graphics, their escapades as well as their relationships with each other and their parents, their experiences and connections (with Adolf Hitler and fascism, communism, civil rights, racism to name but a few), and their influence in the world (in literature, politics, and popular culture). Pond also writes of their effect on her young life in the 1960s and 1970s in California. It's a treat--do admit!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mimi Pond has created a masterpiece! A fabulous group portrait of the Mitford Sisters, and a memoir of her nearly-lifelong fascination with them, absolutely gorgeous to look at, and brilliant to read. This is no easy task, given that (A) there's a lot of ground to cover with this group; and (B) the Mitford industry has been going strong for a long time, so one might feel that this ground has been covered. And yet, Mimi Pond has done the impossible, and given us a compelling new look at the whole saga.
Highly recommended!

[Rachel Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much fun! A delightfully unusual graphic novel/comic about my favorite pack of eccentric British sisters.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to frame every page of this book. It’s so incredibly beautiful: with just blue ink, Mimi Pond brings to life the extraordinary story of the Mitford sisters. She neither glorifies nor hides the horrendous ideas most of them held; she confronts them head-on and makes them an integral part of the story. But it’s also the story of how six women took a firm grip on world history.

[Nile]

A few baffling mistakes not picked up by the author or publisher:

1) The Sudetenland was not previously part of Germany, stripped of it at Versailles. It was part of Austria-Hungary. The point is that this was the point Hitler had stepped past acts like entering the Rhineland et al, winding down Versailles, and actively threatened war. That is why it was appeasement as opposed to 'hey well maybe we were too harsh in the first place and is it really all that bad'.

2) The Soviets did not kill 300,000 people in Hungary during the Uprising, a figure so ludicrous it would have made any occupation impossible. The most liberal estimates put the deaths at 1% of this, 3,000.

Both of these points have little to do with the women but should absolutely have been picked up by anyone casting a diligent eye over the book.

The book itself is a fun enough read.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Masterful.

[milo in the woods · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is such a unique book. it's a graphic novel history of the mitford sisters, interspersed with relevant biographical details of the authors life, and the ways in which she relates to them.

as a well-read and british young woman, i have a complicated relationship with the mitfords. they kind of epitomise the sisterly bond that i have never gotten to experience. in british media, their self-mythologising has worked; they're borderline folkloric figures and whilst not everyone knows exactly who they are, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone completely ignorant of their impact on society.

diana may have been villainised (rightfully so) in the 1940's and 50's for her fascist sympathies, but she's still often remembered as 'the beautiful one'. british media often villainises nancy for turning her into the police (making comments about the jealousy she must have held towards her sister, for being young and fertile), and memorialises diana for her beauty and aristocracy. not only was diana a fascist, she also seems to have been a bully. i digress, the point is that these women were wonderfully complex and mimi pond seems to get that in ways that other biographers and commentators haven't.

unity was a nazi, obsessed with hitler, but she was also a seriously unwell, vulnerable young woman. these two truths can co-exist. all of these women were complex and multi-faceted and hard to define, or categorise. despite all their differences and disagreements and snide comments, they seem to have shared a bond that i can never quite get a read on. it's fascinating, simply put, and this graphic novel did a really good job of helpung me articulate my thoughts and consider the mitford sisters in depth.

i adored the artwork in this graphic novel! it is of a style that i really enjoyed looking at, and some of the ways in which the text is integrated into the drawings are super unusual and fascinating to look at. sometimes pages took a little longer to decipher because it wasn't always clear to me what order i ought to be reading in, but that wasn't much trouble. and my reading experience was so enhanced by the illustrations, and the use of silhouette's and imagery.

i also wanted to note that i liked the way this author wrote about grief. the mitford sisters' lives were complex, and people they cared about died tragically. this was written about in a sensitive and appropriate manner in my opinion, and some of the illustrations related to grief were very moving.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overly-fond look at the Mitford family. The family contains the whole of British aristocracy from the last century: money lost and found, Nazis, prolific writers, savers of The Big Country House, quiet LGBT folks, and one who flees to America to fight for some good. Reading this book right now in American history, all I can say is: I wish someone had punched Diana and Unity in the throat. Their position as Hitler fans makes them so repugnant that it's hard to understand why anyone would want to know more about them. (Jessica? Sure. I guess.) The panel layouts were very interesting and so beautiful, but sometimes hard to follow. And there are so many names and nicknames that it's often hard to keep track of who's a quasi-decent person and who's a white supremacist scumbag. Tiny bits of the author's life are sprinkled in for no apparent reason. I keep seeing this book on 2025 best-of lists, so worth a read perhaps; but not my favorite. Great art though.
And, it cannot be said enough times: Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists are hideous and not worthy of any admiration. None.

[Tim Rooney · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this because it was on a lot of best-of lists but to say I didn’t care for it is an understatement. The Mitford sisters story is an interesting sideways look at history and how this family somehow ended up tangentially involved in all sorts of history. But Pond tying in bits of memoir doesn’t work, and disrupts the flow of the story and adds very little.

More than anything though, this thing was difficult to read. Like, genuinely hard to decipher. The balloons and captions do not flow in alogical way and I was constantly reading the wrong parts first. The spinning layout’s gave me a headache, the use of cursive in a light pencil was totally disruptive. I’m a professional comics critic who reads a lot of comics. This is a cartooning problem not a reader problem.

[Kara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the Mitford sisters, showing their background, what they individually and together, who influenced them and how they influenced others. They are a great example of how to show the personal, on the ground version of big events of the mid-20th century when so often that history is only looked on at a macro level. I wasn't thrilled with the illustration style that often made it hard to read, especially when so much information was crammed onto each page, but the content itself was so interesting, and you can see why Nancy was inspired to put her crazy family down on paper.

[Alley McGlynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy moly, the fact that Mimi Pond illustrated this entire CHONKER of a graphic novel, in the most beautiful way, I can’t help but give it five stars! It would take me a weekend to do just ONE of the hundreds of pages she’s done, so basically, I now worship her. I had no idea that the Mitford sisters were so notorious! I’ve read Nancy Mitford’s well-known novels and enjoyed them, but wasn’t aware that they were semi-autobiographical about her eccentric family. I always love reading about the different roles of women and families during WWII, so the timeframe was also right up my alley.

[Jody Banman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating and well researched account of the diverse lives and times of six sisters remarkable as much for their disparate lives and differences with each other as for their relative talents and fame. I have but one complaint, it's difficult to read at points due to the way the text is at times positioned, at times sideways and at others spiralling, I get that it's an artistic choice, but I just found it irritating and a tad overused.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently watched a tv mini-series about this uproarious family of six sisters and one brother born into a lower (at least less wealthy) rung of British aristocracy. I was instantly drawn into this wildly creative, sometimes wrenching, often laugh out loud funny graphic novel. It helped to know a little something about them ahead of reading it. Six very strong minded and iron willed women.

[Renaud Houde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow mais qu'elle travaille ce livre, les différents styles de narrations et dessins explorés sont incroyables. Une histoire énorme, complexe et avec tellement de liens fous que l'autrice arrive à très bien raconter.

[Penelope Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a cool book! My dad got it for me for Christmas after watching the new Mitford show Outrageous (also so good). It’s such a fascinating story and Pond told it in such a fun, creative way with beautiful illustrations. Highly recommend!

[Daphne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was excellent, but I have to say the way she drew noses from the front drove me INSANE.

[Wren James · Rating 5 out of 5]

instantly took a place on my 'fave books of all time list'

[Bronwyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t really even know how to talk about the Mitfords at this point. I love them and hate them and find them so interesting. I’ve read a few group biographies now and this is a great addition to them.

Mimi Pond’s art is beautiful and the book just flies by. The images have so much detail and there are so many different “type” faces. The book is kept light, even when discussing dark topics, but it never shies away from them either.

I found the graphic nonfiction style helped me connect better to these women. Like I said, I’ve read a few biographies of these women, but reading about them and seeing them really hit differently. Having maps and handwritten letters really made it all fit into place and connect better. I don’t think I’ve cried at their deaths while reading other biographies.

I loved this. I’m so glad Mimi poured herself into this. I liked learning a bit about her. Just an amazing book. Great way to start the year.