It’s no tortured Magda Olivero affair, but today’s New York Times obituary of Deborah Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire and the last of the Mitford sisters, offers this gem:

Being a Mitford, Deborah could hardly have been conventional. Diana married a fascist in the presence of Goebbels and Hitler. Jessica was a Communist and wrote witty books. Unity Valkyrie, in love with Hitler, shot herself when Britain declared war. Pamela as a child wanted to be a horse and married a fabled jockey. Nancy’s books satirized the upper classes. And Deborah, tentatively, became a connoisseur of fine poultry.

Robert d. mcfadden, New York Times

That’s a vast simplification of the Mitfords (see: The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family and The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters for mere patches of the much bigger picture), but doesn’t it beautifully capture what Tolstoy meant when he wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own fascist-crazed, poultry-loving way.”

The Duchess of Devonshire gave many interesting interviews in recent years; you can find two here and here. Her enduring relationship with Diana, whose appalling politics caused Jessica (the greatest of all the Mitfords, if not a stellar mother) to cut ties with her and Nancy to inform on her to MI5, is one of the more eyebrow-raising threads of the epic Mitford saga.