The Joys of Binge Reading

On Binge Reading this week, biographical fiction author Marie Benedict talks about her latest best seller, The Mitford Affair, the story of the beautiful and notorious Mitford sisters. Famous as the debutant daughters of an English Peer and then infamous as World War II traitors

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and critics rave about Marie Benedict’s uncanny ability to unearth untold woman’s stories – from Albert Einstein’s first wife to the hidden life of Agatha Christie – from JP Morgan’s personal librarian- to Andrew Carnegie’s maid, she’s written about them all.

On Binge Reading today, Marie talks about where her passion for storytelling comes from and how she works on excavating stories like a literary archaeologist.

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Links to things discussed in this episode

The Mists of Avalon – the book that got Marie hooked on history: : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mists_of_Avalon

Mists of Avalon TV series; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244353/

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Mists-Avalon-Marion-Zimmer-Bradley/dp/0345350499

Lord Redesdale (The Mitford daughter’s father: https://spartacus-educational.com/SSredesdale.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mitford,_2nd_Baron_Redesdale

The Mystery of Mrs Christie, by Marie Benedict: https://www.authormariebenedict.com/the-mystery-of-mrs-christie.html

Mileva Einstein: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/

The Other Einstein, by Marie Benedict: https://www.authormariebenedict.com/the-other-einstein.html

The Personal Librarian: https://www.authormariebenedict.com/the-personal-librarian.html

Victoria Christopher Murray – Marie’s Co-Author and author in her own right of more than 30 books: https://victoriachristophermurray.com/

Belle da Costa Greene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_da_Costa_Greene

Mick Herron: The Slough House series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Herron

Mary McLeod Bethune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McLeod_Bethune

Eleanor Roosevelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt

Where to Find Marie Benedict Online

Website: authormariebenedict.com

Facebook: @authormariebenedict

Instagram: @authormariebenedict

Don’t forget if you enjoy the show, do leave us a review so others can find us too. But now here’s Marie.

Introducing Author Marie Benedict Biographical fiction author Marie Benedict

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Marie, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Marie Benedict: I am absolutely delighted to be here as, as I said to you right before you hit the record button, obviously I love to talk books, but oh my gosh, I love New Zealand and it’s just such a delight to get to talk with you while you were there.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Now you’ve made a name for yourself. write a bestselling historical fiction about real women’s stories.

Some of them well-known women, others of them not so well known at all, but the one that we’re talking about, particularly today, and the latest one is about the very famous Mitford girls in wartime England, and just before the Second World War.

Tell us, first of all, where did this love women’s stories come from.

Marie Benedict: Well for me, it started long, long ago, decades ago when I was in middle school, in my early teenage years. I had this wonderful aunt who was an English professor and a poet, and she was a rebellious nun and she was just awesome.

And she was the one who was, if you’re lucky in your life, you have this one person who gives you the right books, the perfect books at the right time.

And she was that person in my life and she gave me many really impactful books.

But the one that set me on the path that I’m on today started with a book she gave me. it was called The Mists of Avalon (by Marion Zimmer Bradley).

The book that changed Marie’s life The Mystery of Mrs Christie by Marie Benedict – one of the ‘famous’ people Marie has written about

It was, it’s not going to sound revolutionary when I describe it, but back when it was first written, it really was, it was a retelling of the Arthurian legend from the perspective of the women.

And it was like, in our lives we have these epiphany moments. And, that’s what it was for me.

It was like, oh my God, like history legend and lore is so much more than I’ve been told. It’s so much bigger and there are so many voices and perspectives that people are not hearing. And that is really when my quest began.

I ended up getting a history degree and then I took this long detour as a lawyer, before I circled back to this, into writing these stories, which is really what I was always supposed to be doing.

Jenny Wheeler: And that’s such a good way of describing what you do, revealing the details of the stories. Now with the Mitfords, there’s a lot of detail there to be unearthed, what drew you to them? I mean, they are famous women. A lot of their story was already known.

Marie Benedict: Right. So, you know, it’s interesting, there’s only a couple women that I’ve written about who were known, Agatha Christie is the probably the most famous one. but in each case where I’ve chosen a woman who’s better known, it’s a lesser known part of their life that I’m interested in exploring.

I’m interested in exploring the secrets, the things that were brushed under the rug, and the way in which those things reverberate into the present. I’m all about the legacy and sometimes we think like with Agatha Christie, which was a couple books ago, we think we know her and we think we know her legacy, but the reality is there’s so much more to her story and I’m interested in that part of women’s histories as well.

Downton Abbey meets The Crown

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. With The Mitford Affair, which has been described as Downtown Abbey Meets The Crown – you’ve got six extraordinary sisters who enthralled England and much of the world,

They looked, in the mid 1930s, like they were totally destined to marry lords and have a rich and an aristocratic life. And because of the way things turned out politically with the war, it didn’t happen like that at all.

Now you excavate the rivalries between the sisters very well. Was that part of what drew you to the story, the way they all six worked together or against each other?

Marie Benedict: Yes, it was fascinating to me. I am the oldest of six – four sisters and two brothers, and my family is not like theirs, nobody’s is like the Mitfords. But at the same time, I have seen first hand the way in which sibling relationships dictate our personalities, our belief systems, the decisions we make, and sometimes it’s unconscious.

And when I got to know the Mitford story, they weren’t super well known to me, until I did some research for another book I wrote about the Churchills. I wrote a book about Winston Churchill’s wife and the Mitfords, who were related to the Churchills – kept on coming up.

And that was when I learned more and more about the role these women played first as social luminaries who defied everybody’s expectations that they’d marry well, right? (Except for one sister.)

Sibling rivalries exposed The Personal Librarian – Marie Benedict’s happy co-writing partnership with Victoria Christopher Murray/

And then these darker pieces of their past and that story overlaid with this sibling relationship and the way in which these sisters each followed dramatically different political paths at a time period of great unrest and great polarization.

It was just fascinating to me to see how those things evolved.

Particularly when you look at our own society and the way in which we have so much polarization today. I’m always interested in the way in which the past reverberates into the present, and I couldn’t resist their story,

Jenny Wheeler: Their mother Lady Redesdale apparently once said, “whenever I see the words peer’s daughter in a headline, I know it’s going to be something about one of my girls.”

Marie Benedict: Yes, exactly.

Jenny Wheeler: And she wasn’t exaggerating, was she?

Marie Benedict: No, she wasn’t. I mean, they were regularly in the newspaper. Now, admittedly in the earlier years it was more society reports. You know, the girls were all debutantes. They were always the best balls and, their outfits and the people, they danced with all those things, that was another interesting part of the world.

And yet, as the years went on, what they were most known for was the scandals in which they became embroiled. Beginning with Diana, the, third oldest who had been, oh my gosh, she’s the one who started out marrying well, right?

The perfect life got boring

She married the heir to the Guinness Beer fortune, she had this fabulous life with her adoring husband and her two young children, and she left it all for a married, Sir Oswald Wesley, who was the head of the leader of the fascist Unit in Great Britain.

And it was just unfathomable to people. And it was the stuff of great scandal. I mean, that was the sort of thing that just simply wasn’t done. Even today it would’ve been a huge scandal, but back then, even more so, and that was just the beginning of the sorts of things that these sisters became headline news.

Jenny Wheeler: Mosley, I could not really understand the attraction for him. And when I Googled around her a bit about him, I found that he was an absolute philander who had right at the beginning made it clear that he wasn’t going to leave his wife. So, it wasn’t as if she was just quietly going to take up separate residences and then marry him as soon as he was available.

She understood right from the beginning that wasn’t going to happen. Did you ever really get a sense of why he was so utterly tempting?

Marie Benedict: You know, it’s such a great question. and you and I are not the only two to, muse on that. Sometimes when I give speeches, I like to even just show pictures, like her first husband was stunning and smart and kind and adored her. And then you’ve got this other guy who’s a cad and he’s married and he’s sleeping with his sisters-in-law.

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And he’s just awful in every sense of the word. And I don’t know that we’ll ever really know why, but I think my personal pop psychology view, having spent way too much time with Diana is that it was the thrill of the chase. You know, Mosley was never, ever really hers.

Not even when they married, not even in later years. I don’t want to give too much away, but when they were social pariahs, when they had children together, he was a challenge and Diana was very smart. She lived in an era where careers weren’t something that women, at least women of her stature generally did.

And I think she was horribly bored by all that adulation and easy life that, Brian Guinness offered.

And I think. Mosley was a challenge, and she went after him with her heart and her mind. She became fully enamored of his belief system, she was an apolitical creature prior to being with him.

She adopted his views as her views, and I think everything she did was in service of keeping Mosley close.

That’s my personal view. I think he was he never really was hers and that was a great challenge for her.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Now the story focuses a lot on Nancy Mitford, who we know very well as a top novelist and her rising alarm about the passion that both Diana and the other sister Unity seem to be developing for the Nazi party.

Similar political passions, different motivations Marie Benedict – Carnegie’s Maid – excavating hidden women’s stories

It’s clear also that you bring up, well, that the two sisters Unity and Diana probably went for the Nazis for very different motivations.

I mean, you’ve already made it clear that probably Diana went simply because it was a way to influence and gain power over Oswald, whereas Unity was probably a genuine convertee. Talk a bit about the dynamic between those three sisters.

Marie Benedict: Yeah, you’ve just asked such a good question. One of the things that was really fascinating for me was how people form their political belief systems.

Right? It isn’t the way I naively thought years ago when people read about them and then came up with an informed belief system that matched their morals.

I don’t think for most people it’s that conscious a decision. I think very often our political belief systems are born out of things that are happening to us personally and we be follow one movement or the other based on that. and I think as you mentioned in Diana’s case, Oswald was the head of the fascists in Great Britain.

It behooved him to forge alliances with the other fascist leaders across Europe. And through, and I’ll talk in a minute, a connection that, Diana had with Hitler. she wanted to deliver an alliance with Hitler to him because that would cement her relationship with Mosley forever.

The tragedy of Unity Mitford

And that’s basically what she did.

So, I think she went after her belief system, her adherence to Nazism in a very calculating way, to serve a very personal desire.

It’s funny because on the other hand, when you look at Unity, who you know you want to dislike her more because in many ways she is a true believer in Nazism, and that part of her is really reprehensible, but she comes to that belief system for more sympathetic reasons.

She was really the odd man out in her familial sibling dynamic. She was the least attractive. She was the most ungainly. She was not the prettiest. She was not the smartest’ at least that’s what the other sisters told her.

And she wanted to find her own way of standing out her own identity, her own special thing.

And, unfortunately, she chose Nazism. It was the worst thing. But the reason she chose it was a sad reason.

It was trying to fill a void and create an identity for herself, and her obsession with Nazism and Adolf Hitler specifically, with whom she had a very close relationship it’s just appalling.

And yet when you look at the why you think it was really Diana who was much more manipulative in that dynamic of the relationship.

The personal is political

Jenny Wheeler: Now this is interesting. I know I don’t want to get us into trouble talking current politics

However, you do note on these ways that we form our views on politics, whether the personal comes first or whether the political thinking comes first.

Would you like to comment at all in your own world on how you see that playing out today?

Marie Benedict: Well, I have to say it was trying to understand people’s political views that attracted me to this story.

In this world when we have such far ranging and distinctly opposite political views and sometimes in people that I find surprising.

Right. I think we’ve all had the experience of having someone that we think we’re close to or thought we know, and their political views surprise us.

And I was having a lot of trouble trying to understand it.

And in this book it’s throws all those issues in bold relief.

It really lays bare how people come to believe what they believe. It helped me process it. It didn’t give me all the answers or anything, nor did it always make me more sympathetic, but it definitely helped me understand.

And very often when I choose a topic and a woman, usually each woman’s life has topics that lend itself to the story.

I’m usually processing something of my own. And for me, this story. was helping me process some very real political divisions that I was seeing in modern times.

A political commitment that was delusional Rosalind Franklin – her untold story. Her discovery changed the world, Three men took the credit.

Jenny Wheeler: Because they generate such absolute passion sometimes, don’t they?

And I think looking from afar, one of the things, and I’m certain it happens everywhere, is the way that some people very conveniently can drop some of their moral or ethical views.

Marie Benedict: mm-hmm.

Jenny Wheeler: To follow someone who quite clearly is not, of the same level They brush inconvenient aspects those under the carpet.

And that seemed to happen with both of the Mitford girls who went after Nazism. They could turn an utterly blind eye. I think Unity was living in an apartment which had been taken away from a Jewish family

Marie Benedict: It was like blinders in her case. She was, in many ways, I think, not mentally well, she was unstable emotionally, and that’s not an excuse on her part by any stretch, but her ability to put those blinders on was, it was almost delusional. Right. Diana knew.

And it didn’t suit her, so she chose not to address it or think about it, So, it was amazing to me the way in which they could pick and choose what part of the belief system that appealed to them.

And, you got to see it play out with their parents as well.

Here you have Lord and Lady Redesdale. I mean, Lord Redesdale s hated the Germans. He fought against them in World War I.

He would storm around the house sometimes yelling about the Huns, which is what he called the Germans, when the girls were growing up.

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Marie Benedict – Mitford Madness