He who can live in infamy is unworthy of life.

Author, journalist and political campaigner                          

Selected Works:

Hons and Rebels aka Daughters and Rebels - 1960
The American Way of Death - 1963
The Trial of Dr. Spock, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchel Goodman, and Marcus Raskin - 1970

Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business - 1973
A Fine Old Conflict - 1977
The Making of a Muckraker - 1979
Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking - 1979

Grace Had an English Heart: The Story of Grace Darling, Heroine and Victorian Superstar - 1988
The American Way of Birth - 1992
The American Way of Death Revisited - 1998

Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by journalist Peter Y. Sussman.
                          

Mother Sydney Bowles
Father David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, five daughters, one son.
Pamela Mitford - 25 November 1907 – 12 April 1994
Thomas Mitford - 2 January 1909 – 30 March 1945
Diana Mitford - 17 June 1910 – 11 August 2003
Unity Mitford - 8 August 1914 – 28 May 1948
Jessica Mitford - 11 September 1917 – 22 July 1996
Deborah Mitford - born 31 March 1920
First husband Esmond Romilly, two daughters, Julia Decca Romilly, died of measles when five months old.
Second daughter Constancia. Esmond died during a bombing raid over Nazi Germany - 1941.

Second husband Robert Treuhaft in 1943, two sons.                          

J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, reviewed Mitford's book of letters, Decca, in the Sunday Telegraph in 2006.

Rowling stated in 2002, "My most influential writer, without a doubt, is Jessica Mitford. When my great-aunt gave me Hons and Rebels when I was 14, she instantly became my heroine. She ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War, taking with her a camera that she had charged to her father's account. I wished I'd had the nerve to do something like that. I love the way she never outgrew some of her adolescent traits, remaining true to her politics – she was a self-taught socialist – throughout her life. I think I've read everything she wrote. I even called my daughter Jessica Rowling Arantes after her."                          

Her mother did not believe in sending girls to school.

Jessica's sisters Unity and Diana were well-known British supporters of Hitler and her father was described as being "one of nature's fascists," Jessica, also known as "Decca" renounced her privileged background at an early age and became an adherent of communism. She was known as the "red sheep" of the family.