Poison Penmanship

For my part, I can’t remember when I enjoyed a collection of journalism so much, or laughed out loud so often… It is also useful as, and intended to be useful as, a manual for doing the kind of journalism she did. Guardian Contains some of her finest work and is also a guide to becoming a top muckraker, complete with Mitford’s list of essential qualities, such as ‘an appetite for tracking and destroying the ennemy’. New Statesman “I wish I could point to some overriding social purpose in these articles.” Mitford laments in her introduction. However the lack of an explicit agenda is part of the collection’s appeal: these are articles written with a keen eye for injustice, but also with a great sense of personal passion, and a generous, exuberant wit. Observer Most collections of journalistic pieces barely warrant being bound in book form: this one (from 1979) with its wit and irrepressible ebullience, genuinely makes a convincing “classic” of a sort. Scotsman

Jessica Mitford (1917-1996) was the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale. She and her five sisters and one brother grew up in isolation on their parents’ Cotswold estate. Rebelling against her family’s hidebound conservatism, Mitford became an outspoken socialist. With her second cousin and husband-to-be Esmond Romilly, she ran away to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Romilly was killed in World War II, and Mitford moved to America, where she married the lawyer and political activist Robert Treuhaft.

A brilliant muckraking journalist, Mitford was the author of, among other works, a memoir of her youth, Hons and Rebels; a study of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death; and Kind and Unusual Punishment: The Prison Business. She died at the age of seventy-eight while working on a follow-up to The American Way of Death, for which, with characteristic humor, she proposed the title “Death Warmed Over.”

Jane Smiley is the winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the author of many novels and other works. In 2010 she published Private Life, a novel; A Good Horse, a book for young adults; and The Man Who Invented the Computer, the first volume of the Sloane American Inventors series.

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