Do Admit! – The Mitford Sisters and Me
Cartoonist: Mimi Pond
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me is an interesting duel portrait by cartoonist Mimi Pond. By paralleling the lives of the many Mitford Sisters with her own, Pond’s new book captures what it feels like to have a special interest, to be trapped by the social expectations of being a woman, and to find kindred spirits in unexpected places. And though it tries to be honest about the warts-and-all ways of the Mitfords, this story is also perhaps a little too easygoing on some of their (major) flaws.
Every girl has a heroine. Some folks make Jo March or Anne Shirley their entire personalities when they’re nine years old and then go through life that way. For Mimi Pond — living in a dull lonely house and yearning for more — her special interest was the fabulous, fashion-forward but highly controversial (two fascists sit among their number) Mitford Sisters. Do Admit! is a warts-and-all chronicle of life among that vaunted brood, and it chronicles their lives from childhood to death.
It’s a shared lifetime crowded with incidence; Nancy, the eldest, became an acclaimed author; Pamela lived a happy, rural life, surviving two divorces and eventually living with a woman; Diana left a Guinness Beer heir to take up with a fascist leader named Oswald Mosley; Unity became Hitler’s confident and shot herself in the head when she realized Germany and England were heading to opposite sides of the battle lines in World War II; Jessica became a communist and a rebellious reporter; and Deborah became a modern society sophisticate.
Pond draws careful parallels between herself and the Mitfords’ way of being. She does so by including things like her no-
nonsense parents, and a lousy relationship in college giving way to self-discovery for her in the 1970s. She parallels her lonely-feeling, isolated childhood with the literal isolation of the young Mitfords. Her art and writing are deeply creative as well as being quite accurate to the tenets of biography — while noting that even the Mitfords never quite stayed close to stringent facts when talking about their family lives.
Pond also uses startling visual metaphors to accomplish this sort of art. Jessica envisions a man trying to trick her into going home, and leaving her first husband, Esmond Romilly, in Spain as a gigantic turkey while being tempted by his promises of food. Nancy is seen as an enormous set of female reproductive organs while a variety of miscarriages and hysterectomies play out. Lovely, lumpen, and artfully water-colored, these illustrations fascinate — they are surreal but loveable all the way.
Pond’s affection for her subjects is crystal clear, which is why it’s unsurprising that her attempt at being even-handed with Diana and Unity’s fascism comes off as light-handed, almost too playful for such a heavy subject. She does recognize all of their wrongs, but it’s hard to credit sympathetic drawings of Diana alone in her jail cell, or to stir up pity for Unity as she disappears into a world of her own making.
Nonetheless, Do Admit! is an incredible piece of work that deserves serious consideration. Thick and truthful, but messy and imperfect, Do Admit! is a lovely trip into the author’s brain.
Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me is now available
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