The conformity was shaped, too, by early manifestation of each sisters’s peculiarities and distinctly different personalities. She was schooled by a governess and pursued a childhood of social grooming that would lead to the prize - a season of debutante balls, presentation to the queen and the quest for a husband, preferably titled. She spent Saturdays fox hunting and Sundays ice skating. In a real-life, upper-class soap opera that made TV series “Downton Abbey” look positively uneventful, Deborah Mitford - often called “Debo” - emerged as a long-suffering peacemaker between her squabbling siblings. Pamela led the quieter life of an upper-class countrywoman, devoted to her dogs and her garden. Two of her sisters, Diana and Unity, were friends of Adolf Hitler their eldest sibling, Nancy, was a best-selling novelist, and another, Jessica, was a Communist who moved to California and wrote her own bestseller, “The American Way of Death” (1963), a wry look at the underhanded practices of the funeral industry. Her role in Chatsworth’s fortunes alone marked her for posterity, but she will be remembered as the sixth and youngest of the Mitford sisters, whose outlandish behavior and political radicalism seemed to make them characters contrived by one of their chums, the satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh. She lived near the Derbyshire estate of Chatsworth House, the neoclassical palace that she and her husband, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, rescued from its post-World War II nadir and revived as one of England’s finest country houses. The death was announced by her son, Peregrine, who did not release the location or cause. Deborah Mitford, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, was the last of six famous sisters in an upper-crust British family whose antics left her countrymen shocked, appalled and always entertained.

Wait for me by deborah mitford