Collected Letters:After reading the Communist Manifesto, Jessica (Decca) Mitford, aged 15, berated her mother for being a scourge of the working class.
"No, I am not," replied Lady Redesdale. " . . . In fact, I find some of them quite sweet." For the passionately idealistic Decca, the die was cast and from then on, she led a life dedicated to political activism, writing - and enjoying herself. The idealism led to conflict with her sister, Diana Mosley, wife of the Nazi leader Oswald Mosley. In fact the two were not "on speakers" for 34 years and even then, they avoided politics. "We talk about nothing except parsley-weeding," Decca noted drily.
Editing Decca The Collected Letters of Jessica Mitford, Peter Sussman has prefaced each section with a resumé of what is about to come, so even as we read the young Decca's breathless yearning for her beloved husband off fighting the war against the Nazis, we know - though she doesn't - that the telegram is already on its way to tell her he has been lost in action. Esmonde Romilly was 23 when he died, leaving Decca a 24-year-old widow with a daughter to care for.
Esmonde and she, 18 and 19 respectively, had run off together to Spain and the civil war. When news of their marriage reached Lord Redesdale, he disinherited Decca and the two never met again.
The letters - she kept carbon copies of them all - are an unending flow of righteous indignation about issues such as racism, the Vietnam war, segregation of black people and the iniquities of the American funeral industry, all interspersed with a brand of devastating wit, the product of her commonsense English heritage.
"I do hope you're not going to be frank," wrote one of her sisters - she had five in all - on learning that Decca was engaged in writing about the family.
It was her second marriage, to civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft - characterised by the FBI as " one of the 39 most dangerous lawyers in the US" - that led her to write the book for which she is most famous: The American Way of Death. Treuhaft, incensed by the way funeral directors conned vulnerable people into parting with their money, set up the Bay Area Funeral Co-op and his research greatly added to her success.
But it is Decca herself who comes shining through these letters in which she addresses people in extravagantly affectionate terms - darling Dinkydonk (her daughter), darling old Bob (her husband), my darling Muv (her mother), writing to friends and family two or three times a week and then complaining when they failed to reply immediately.
As her writing career took off - she was an excellent investigative journalist - she would spend hours at the end of the day writing to Bob as a means of ordering her thoughts, sharpening her approach and polishing her prose.
On occasion, her investigations led to disastrous results - for friends as much as for herself. While in Montgomery, she borrowed her hosts' car to drive to a church to hear Martin Luther King speak. An angry mob surrounded the church and she was trapped inside overnight during which the friends' car was torched. She wrote to Bob to tell him the bad news: " (they) had no insurance to cover the burning of the car so I'm afraid we're stuck with it. Doesn't have to be an expensive one, this one was about a 54 Buick". She and Bob were subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee of un-American Activities. The FBI trained surveillance cameras on her and on one occasion, when warned she might have to submit to a body search, she was furious: "I am not going to be stripped," she wrote, "for one thing, I don't have any decent slips or a good enough garter belt and I'm not going to buy new ones just for them." Her spirit was exhilarating and indomitable and it is a credit to all that is right and just in both England and the US that the one produced her and the other found a place for her.
Mary Russell is a writer and journalist
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford Edited by Peter Y Sussman Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 744pp . £25