Finding Lost Voices: A Conversation About the "Difficult" Mitford Sister, Jessica, with Biographer Carla Kaplan
Rabbit holes are both the bane of any biographer’s existence and, at the same time, our joy. Whenever I write something for Finding Lost Voices, however, I have to control how far I go down the sidequests of research I discover so as not take a year to write a single post. But, according to Carla Kaplan, who just published a stunning and comprehensive biography about the aristocrat turned communist Jessica “Decca” Mitford (1917-1996), going down research rabbit holes was something Decca always indulged in. And it was this childlike curiosity (paired with her incredible sense of humor) that made her investigative journalism (AKA Muckraking) so incredibly delicious to read.
So let’s begin with not a rabbit hole, but a watering hole. Whenever I read a good book, I tell my friend J.J. about it because she’ll always have something to say (good or bad). When I finished Carla Kaplan’s new biography, I called J.J. to tell her how much I enjoyed it and to ask if she’d ever met Jessica Mitford. Such a meeting would not be unlikely, as Decca lived in nearby Oakland. Turns out J.J. had not only met her, she had a story about her. Once, Decca drove up to Sonoma State University to give a reading, and J.J. and other faculty had to decide on where to take her out to dinner. There is a historic roadhouse on Stony Point Road near Petaluma called The Washoe House. Built in 1859, the building was once a stagecoach stop, then a hotel and bar that still operates today. J.J. thought Decca might be impressed by the historic building, so they decided to take her there. But Decca was anything but impressed by the ceilings covered in pinned dollar bills and the greasy hamburgers. But, oh, to have been in that room, to hear her banter about the place!
Over the years, Jessica Mitford and her five other sisters have gotten a lot of attention. They were born into an aristocratic British family in Northumberland and became famous in the 1930s. Jessica was the blacksheep of the mostly fascist family for being a communist. She ran away at a young age to fight in the Spanish Civil War, then eventually escaped to America. She lived for a time in New York, DC, and other U.S. cities before settling in Oakland, CA, where she would follow those rabbit holes and write and fight injustice.
This quarter, I’m teaching a journalism class at UC Davis so I’m thinking a lot about the history of alternative storytelling in our country. When I wrote Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, I learned about the communist-led reportage tradition that used storytelling devices to reveal the other side of stories that traditional journalism wasn’t seeing, such as the lives of women and children. Reportage also didn’t take anything at face value. Instead, one would have to live the experiences themselves in order to write about them.
Decca was a self-proclaimed muckraker. A muckraker is an investigative journalist who specializes in exposing societal corruption, business malpractice, and/or social injustices. Decca’s most famous for writing the bestselling, The American Way of Death (1963), where she (and her husband who helped her write the book) revealed the absurdity of the American funeral home industry. But she wrote hundreds of other short pieces I can’t wait to share with my students as examples of how to not take anything at face value. To instead go down all of the rabbit holes to find the version of the story that is hidden beneath the surface.
Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Carla Kaplan for an enjoyable conversation about Decca and all she learned about her (and herself) while writing the biography. Kaplan had loads of research (over 600 boxes) and spent ten years writing this in-depth look at Decca Mitford. So, fall down this rabbit hole with me as we learn more about Decca’s life and what it means to try to capture it on the page.
Carla Kaplan is an award-winning Professor and writer who holds the Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professorship in American Literature at Northeastern University. She has published seven previous books, including Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, both New York Times Notable Books. A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities “Public Scholar” fellowships, Kaplan has also been a fellow in residence at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, is a fellow of the Society of American Historians, chairs the editorial board of the journal Signs, and serves on the board of Biographers International. Her 8th book, a biography of the British-aristocratturned-American-Communist-and-muckraker Jessica Mitford, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, 2025.
An Interview with Carla Kaplan about Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I really liked how you begin Trouble Maker, explaining why you call your subject “Decca” instead of her given name, Jessica Mitford.
Can you give us the backstory regarding how this project started? Why did Decca become your next subject?
Carla Kaplan: A number of things drew me to Decca. I was looking to do a book on somebody like her, a female activist who was also really funny, well before this book came anywhere near me. However, I never thought it would get to be about Jessica Mitford, of all people, because there is no activist who was funnier than Jessica Mitford. There’s this myth that I labor under that women activists are grim and dreary and no fun to be with. But Decca breaks this mold. Nobody was more fun to be with than Jessica Mitford. It was part of the secret to her success. She was so much fun to be around that she pulled people in from every possible sector of California because everybody just wanted to be in the room with her.
I was also looking for a woman writer whose social-advocacy writing combined a fierce commitment to left politics with playfulness and a distinctive voice. And Jessica Mitford is one of those voices. She is like Virginia Woolf. She is like Jane Eyre. You read one sentence written by Jessica Mitford, and you know it’s her. She doesn’t have to be identified. She has that incredible distinctiveness of voice.
She came into my life as a subject in between the book I wrote on Zora Neale Hurston (Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 2003), and the group biography I wrote about the white women of the Black Harlem Renaissance (Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, 2013). Miss Anne in Harlem was about these women in the 1920s and 30s who made an unlikely choice to go to Black Harlem and be part of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s a story about people trying to be part of a movement that they really don’t belong to, and in some ways, the book ended up being a story of failed allyship, of people who had really good intentions, but what happens when good intentions aren’t enough? And that’s a really important piece of the history of American racism: the failure of good intentions. I knew as I was writing that book that my next book had to be about a successful ally.
Early on, while I was writing Miss Anne in Harlem, I met Jessica Mitford’s daughter, Dinky, and found out that they were looking for somebody to write Decca’s biography. I was gobsmacked. How is it possible that nobody is doing this? There was one earlier biography by a California writer, Leslie Brody (Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford, 2011), that received very little attention. And there was Peter Sussman’s amazing book of Decca’s letters (Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, 2025). But there hadn’t been a big trade biography of Decca. And I thought, how is that possible? She’s funny as hell. Her writing is amazing. And her story is, you can’t make it up to go from the Cotswolds to the American Communist Party, to the head of the bestseller lists, right? So, it kind of dropped in my lap early enough that some of Decca’s remaining family were still alive. So, I was able to interview her last surviving sister and other people who knew her.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: So, did you have complete access to her papers because you were invited by her daughter to write the book?
Carla Kaplan: Yes, and no. Decca left behind all of her papers at two archives: the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and Ohio State University (because they paid her more money than the Ransom Center). And here’s a remarkable thing. Peter Sussman, the editor of her letters, gave me his personal archive. So, between what Peter gave me, what the friends of Decca gave me, what her daughter gave me, and what was in the two American archives, there were just under 600 crammed banker’s boxes of material.
When Decca researched, she researched the way an autodidact researches: there were no stops. She had no disciplinary barriers. She just went down every single rabbit hole. The amount of material was, frankly, unreal. It was a biographer’s dream and a biographer’s nightmare. There was also a substantial archive at Chatsworth House, her sister Debo’s estate. Many Mitford biographers have been granted full access to Chatsworth, including Mary Lovell, who is very sympathetic to the right-wing side of the Mitford family. I was not granted full access. What they didn’t know was that I already had most of the material they had blocked me from getting, thanks to Peter Sussman. So between what Decca left and what Peter gave me and what Dinky (Decca’s daughter) gave me, I had nearly full access.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: That’s amazing.
Carla Kaplan: Actually, there are three things at Chatsworth that still just grate on me that I was not allowed to look at, and I had to look at secondary accounts of them.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Ooh, what are they?
Carla Kaplan: One of them was Decca’s mother’s diary. Fortunately, there were secondary accounts of the diary, so I was able to use those.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: That’s good. What a wonderful story. It’s always a pleasure to see a thick biography like this about a strong, powerful, and revolutionary woman.
From the time Decca was really young, she would push against the norms of her family as if she had counter culture in her blood. Can you talk about how that sensibility led her to her journalistic approach of muckraking, like how she wasn’t afraid to take on weird industries, like the funeral industry? Maybe it was as you said, by going down every single rabbit hole and finding a narrative that did not stand up to anyone, that did not adhere to any norm?
Carla Kaplan: Yeah, she never bent the knee. I mean, boy, do we need her today, right? She’d be incredible!
So you really put your finger on something just now: that Decca was fearless. And the only thing I have been able to discern is that she was ever afraid of was being alone. Some of that fearlessness, we can absolutely trace to an aristocratic, privileged upbringing. Because when you grow up as a child of the aristocracy, you tend to grow up fearless because you always have these enormous resources at your back.
What’s so interesting to me about Decca is that even when all of that material support is gone, her fearlessness remains. So, it sort of comes from her class background, but she somehow manages to keep channeling it and holding on to it even when all the privileges of that background are gone. I find that really fascinating because it reveals that fearlessness was really her steely core. And there are all kinds of ways in which she both turns her back on that background, but carries what she needs out of it with her. It’s almost like she’s got a satchel of chosen things that she takes out of that background. She drops everything connected to wealth, privilege, and prestige, but she holds on to certain pieces that are important to her, and you can see them throughout her life. Her fearlessness is just an amazing piece of it. And it was evident even as a little child. So when she took the positions she took as a young person, as a teenager, when she became a socialist at 14, she was putting at risk the thing she most loved in the world: being a member of the Mitford tribe. She loved being one of the sisters. She may have loved it more than any of them. And yet, she put it at risk almost immediately for principle. And that ability to sort of love something and put it at risk is key to her personality all her life. She also does this as a writer. She loves her readership. I don’t know anybody who loves fan letters more than Jessica Mitford, except maybe me!
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Yeah, you do such a good job of building her personality in her childhood, and how you carry that in the relationship between her lover and her sisters, and her principles as a person in the relationship she had with her sister, Unity. I thought that was really well executed because it’s very complicated to be a socialist and then a communist who then has a sister who becomes Hitler’s mistress.
Carla Kaplan: Can you even imagine? I mean, lots of us had divided Thanksgiving tables, right? But you can’t get more divided than Jessica Mitford’s family, particularly from her perspective. And interestingly, she didn’t forgo her sister, Unity. She absolutely iced out Diana, whom she blamed for (her husband) Esmond’s death in World War II. But Decca could love her sister even as she detested everything Unity had given her life for. It was really extraordinary.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: It’s such a good lesson for all of us.
Carla Kaplan: Such a good lesson. The other lesson for me is that she never gave up on trying to connect with her other sisters. You know, again, not Diana. But she did want to connect to Nancy and Pamela and Deba. And she was very determined to try to do that. But she would never moderate or modify who she was for them. She tried to connect with them as she was. When she was working on incarceration and the prison industrial complex, she’d write them these long, long letters about her Black prisoner friends. They couldn’t care less. This is the last thing they were interested in. And she didn’t try to connect with them as they would like her to be. She tried to connect with them as she was, which is so interesting to me. And it did really work.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: You portrayed that really well in the biography. Let’s go back to her journalism. As you may know, my last biographical subject was Sanora Babb, who was a communist writer during the 1930s. So I was extremely interested in how Decca’s communism influenced her journalism. Was she influenced by the communist tradition of writing reportage, like the work of Tillie Olson and Meridel Le Sueur? And I wonder if you could talk about her journalism and how being a woman influenced that.
Carla Kaplan: I think she was very much influenced by a whole tradition of women journalists. I think the first ones who influenced her were the women journalists she read and met in Spain. For her, the Spanish Civil War was the complete paradigm shift in her thinking. Prior to that, her thinking was sort of anti-aristocratic, which is to say she was interested and empathetic towards other people, which the aristocracy is not. But what she learned from the Spanish Civil War and from the kind of reporting women reporters were doing there was the importance of a deeply committed form of being an ally to struggles that were not your own. Because Esmond had fought in the war (he was one of the only survivors of his brigade) she knew about people who put their lives on the line for others. And so much of the reporting that women reporters were doing was on the international brigades, the work of international leftists who came to Spain to fight for principle. And I think those lessons were incredibly important to Decca’s politics and to her journalism.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: That makes sense. When did she become a member of the Communist Party?
Carla Kaplan: That’s such a funny story. About a year after her first husband, Esmund, was killed in WWII, she met Bob Truehaft in Washington DC. He ended up following her to California, and they got married soon after. Both of them had this dream of joining the Communist Party, but what’s so funny is that they thought they had to be invited. They begin doing all kinds of advocacy work while they’re waiting for an invitation. But they do get invited, and they join in 1943 (shortly after getting married). And she spent just under 20 years in the Communist Party.
And to go back to your earlier question, the communist party was really influential on her journalism. There was almost nothing in the communist newspapers that carried her byline, but she wrote for the communist paper for almost 20 years. Working for the party helped her develop her leadership, investigative skills, and writing. But a lot of the work she did was through the Communist Party Civil Rights Congress, which was doing work in Oakland, California, that nobody else was doing in the black community. They were dealing with labor issues, housing issues, but mostly police brutality issues. So they were dealing with just an extraordinary amount of police violence and police brutality that nobody else was touching. Not the NAACP, not the Urban League. This was the bulk of her work. And frequently, the CRC would take up a particular case and try to use it educationally throughout the community to organize, to fundraise, to do all kinds of work. And every time they took up a particular case, what they essentially wrote up was a case study. When we think about fundraising campaigns today, we know that at the heart of every fundraising campaign, there’s a 300-page case study that you can give to donors that puts the whole thing in perspective. Decca was the one who would write those up for these civil rights cases.
And that, the narrative journalist tradition that exists in the East Bay Communist Party really follows the kind of journalistic narrative history you were describing, you know, the sort of letting the workers tell their story, using case studies to do social justice work. And that all comes right out of muckraking at the turn of the last century, right? So it’s a continuous tradition. And she’s just part of that in her work as a communist, but not publishing under that byline for almost 20 years.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: You brought up that you’d been wanting to write this biography about an ally who was an activist all your life, who was also funny. Is there something about Decca that spoke to you autobiographically, and if so, what was that?
Carla Kaplan: Yes, there were a number of things about Decca that I connect with, most of which I didn’t know when I started working on her. At the beginning of the project, the things that were different about us spoke to me the loudest. The one thing I knew was that Decca and I had the same politics: that Decca had a fierce sense of fairness and an absolute inability to understand the class system. I just immediately related to that. I was one of those five-year-olds who couldn’t make sense of why a few people had so much and so many people had so little.
And there were other qualities in her that I came to see much later. I am almost as stubborn as Jessica Mitford. We are both very, very hard workers. So like me, Decca always put in the 14-hour day. That was her thing. She started her day very much the way I start mine. I know I shouldn’t e-mail before I get to my writing, but I do. I like to be in touch with people. And then I write. Decca always wrote letters before she wrote. Also, Decca and I both love a microphone. We love ourselves a microphone.
The most difficult thing about this book was how little of that familiarity I felt at the beginning. She was very foreign to me at first, both because of her incredible fearlessness, her aristocratic background and her concrete upper lip. She hated the discussion of feelings. In fact, she had a phrase for anybody who talked about their feelings. It was quite derisive. She called it “grubbing about.” I’m a total classic American feminist. I came into feminism through consciousness-raising. My politics were originally the politics of the personal. I was trained to grub about. And I love grubbing about. It’s one of my favorite things. I’m a lifelong grubber about-er. And in that way, we were complete opposites. Decca never talked to anybody about the things that upset her most, ever. And I’m old school American feminist. You call all your friends. You know, you work things out, you process them, as we used to say, by talking about them. So she was very foreign to me. It took me a really long time to feel like I had gotten to know somebody who was that committed to not sharing her feelings. It was terrible, and I despaired over it for years. I thought, I’m never going to get to know this woman! I got to know Hurston much more quickly, even though the gap between us couldn’t have been greater. The women I wrote about in Miss Anne and Harlem, I got to know them pretty quickly….but with Decca, I was struggling. And so that little core of autobiographical things that you can use to stay connected to your subject, I actually didn’t have it for years, and it cost me, it caused me so much despair. I thought I’d never get it. I do feel now I know her very well.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I bet. Did you go to all the places where she lived?
Carla Kaplan: All the places.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Kind of like, as Robert Caro would say, you lived and breathed inside of those spaces. Did that help you feel more acquainted with her?
Carla Kaplan: Went to all the places, including a magical day on the island of Inch Kenneth.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Oh. That sounds amazing.
Carla Kaplan: So magical. It’s still kind of imprinted. In fact, it was so magical for me that I went back three more times and stayed on the island of Iona, which is the neighboring island where you can stay, so that I could live and breathe the Hebrides, a place she loved and that was important to her family. I followed her footsteps everywhere. And I can’t work otherwise. I did it with Hurston. I did it with the women of Miss Anne and Harlem. I had to go stand in the places they had stood. So, with Decca, I sort of alternated between archival work and going to the places where she lived. I was really lucky in that her Oakland home is still in the family.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I was going to ask that because I wanted to go check it out.
Carla Kaplan: I was really lucky in that it is still owned by the family and they let me spend a bunch of time there. And I was also really lucky because when I went to the Cotswolds, And I really wanted to see Asthall Manor, and Swinbrook, the two family homes. And Asthall has been purchased by a woman who was incredibly generous. In fact, I’m doing a gig at Asthall in March with fellow Mitford author, Mimi Pond.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Oh my gosh, how fun is that?
Carla Kaplan: The owner of Asthall let me spend an entire day there and gave me complete access to anything. And then I thought, oh, you know, this is never going to work, but I’m going to try to talk to the person who owns Swinbrook. Well, it turns out, Sarah Lyle, who writes for the New York Times. Her mother, Susan Lyle, owned Swinbrook, and she let me spend an entire day there. So I was incredibly lucky. In that, not only did I go to the places, but I got to get inside all these family houses. I didn’t get to get inside Rutland Gate, the big London house. But I wandered all around it. So yes, I did the whole, you know, Robert Caro, go to the places. And I also tried to do the turn every page with the massive amount of material I found in 600 boxes.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Could you speak to Decca’s education? She grew up in a household where women were not educated or sent to school. But she was tutored by her mother. Did she have outside tutors as well? I mean, how did she become such an incredibly educated woman by the time she began publishing?
Carla Kaplan: So this is the phenomenon of her, Iris, really. Because in fact, she wasn’t really tutored by her mother. Her mother subscribed to the homeschooling system that aristocrats sometimes used for their kids, because other aristocrats also would not put their girls into school for fear that they’d meet other people, because heaven forbid they should meet other people, right? Or hear about the world. So it was called the PNEU system, and you’d get things through the mail, and it was like a correspondence course. And the mother did subscribe to the system, but she barely used it. So, she would start a lesson, maybe it was a lesson about geography or whatever, and was perfectly willing to be distracted and forget about it. She was not interested. She was not educated. She didn’t think her daughters needed education. They were being raised to marry and perpetuate the aristocracy. She was not a reader herself, although she did write a partial autobiography and wrote diaries, but she wasn’t interested in that way. Most of the writing she did was household management. She was an incredible sort of self-trained accountant, but she wasn’t a reader or a social historian. So there was virtually nothing coming from the mother, even though they were in the system. And the mother did hire governesses, so they had governesses always. But as far as we can tell, the governesses were not really interviewed to see if they had the skills to be governesses, because it was a succession of governesses who themselves had no education and no interest in education, and who didn’t actually teach the girls very much that was educational. So what they remembered about the governesses was playing with them, chatting with them. They did read a lot with the governesses. There was a lot of reading out loud. She’s just completely self-taught through reading. What there was was an incredible private library. It was a private library to rival almost any in an English home because their grandfather was a writer. And there are these libraries that the girls have full access to, with nobody supervising what they’re reading. There’s no one to say this isn’t an age-appropriate book. So they’re allowed to read anything they want. And so what their entire education comes out of a completely unchanneled and unsuppressed curiosity, and as it happens, all six of them turn out to be wildly curious girls. They’re just very interested in the world. They’re very interested in things and they’re just free to pursue it.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Wow.
Carla Kaplan: That’s how Jessica Mitford becomes the writer she becomes. I mean, the thing about her writing is it’s always really interesting. You know, I mean, you have a PhD, right? Most of us, when we’re doing our doctorates, we’re not trained to be interesting. And then as writers, we have to learn to be interesting. But Decca was always allowed to be interesting. And so part of the secret to her amazing voice and the engagement of that writing is that it is fueled by an untrammeled curiosity.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I love that. I love how it connects to her loving the mic is the idea that she wants that audience’s attention, and that’s driving her voice. And also that she’s not-- she wasn’t brought upon this path of knowledge. She selected her path.
Carla Kaplan: Right, and because she wasn’t ever bored in classes, as a researcher, as a reader, she’s just giving full rein to that interest of hers. So part of what makes her such an amazing writer is that her research is indefatigable, as I say, it goes down every rabbit hole. She just lets herself be interested.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Who’s your favorite woman biographer who came before you?
Carla Kaplan: I have a large number of women biographers I adore who do work that, to me, seems to combine an incredibly rich historical account with a really vibrant and engaging personal account. So I was influenced by the entire tradition of telling the women’s stories that had never been told. Unearthing women’s stories, whether it’s the wives of famous writers or, you know, the women behind something else. And that’s an incredibly rich tradition. We think about authors like Nancy Milford and Stacey Schiff forging a path. There are so many women biographers who have said, yeah, what was the women’s story? You know, what was the other part of that? In trying to combine research and life, people like Amanda Vaill have been really important to me, helping me keep both afloat. I think about, her book, Everybody Was So Young, that was a really influential book for me. It was a group biography that told individual stories, and told the histories. I think I reread that book four times when I was writing Miss Anne and Harlem. And in a funny way, Jessica Mitford’s biography of her friend Philip Toynbee was very influential on me because I do not think it was a very effective book. And I think she had a funny notion of biography. She actually wrote at one point that to write a biography, you have to not say anything yourself. You can’t have an opinion about your subject. And I thought, oh, Decca. Decca, that’s just wrong.
(She points behind her during the interview to a shelf of books) I mean, this whole shelf is filled with women biographers: Charlotte Gordon and Nancy Cott and Linda Gordon and Megan Marshall and Beverly Gage.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I love that. I have the same shelf. That’s amazing. That brought me to my last question about Decca’s book, Grace Had An English Heart about the English folk hero, Grace Darling. In it, she went back to the story that had been really lionized in English culture about this woman who saved these people from a steamship, right? She went back to that story and revisited it to really deeply understand it. And I love the way you approach telling how she approached writing this book. It was so insightful into who she was and why she’s such an important journalist and writer for us to read now.
Carla Kaplan: I’m so glad that you had that sense about the Grace Darling book. It was easier for me to write about her blockbusters and why they mattered. But it was harder to write about the little books like Grace Darling and why they mattered. And, like almost every writer, she had really big blockbuster books and small passion projects. And Grace Darling was a real passion project for her. It is in Grace Darling that we see her feminist inclinations. Because she loves herself an unsung female heroine. I mean, she’s in your world, Iris of lost voices. She’s in your world of resurrecting and recuperating the lost women. And she’s very much in line with a feminist tradition of doing that. I’m so glad it hit you that way, and that you follow those pieces of it.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Yeah, the parallels between the O-rings from the Challenger explosion and the new mechanical nature of the steamships showed so much of how her brain worked. And I really loved how you brought that to light. The moment in the book made me really see her.
Carla Kaplan: It was also a really important project because she could do a lot of it with her sister Debo. She never lost her longing to be in conversation with her sisters. So that was huge for her. And it was an incredible distraction at a point of personal pain. She always had to have something to take her out of her pain.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: And she had so many tragedies.
Carla Kaplan: So many tragedies, and she just wouldn’t grub about them, you know?
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I’ll have to get that concrete upper lip going.
Carla Kaplan: Yeah, me too.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: It’s been such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you!
Carla Kaplan: So much fun.
For more information about Jessica Mitford, read Troublemaker: The Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
Brilliant as ever! Thank you.
Thank you for this interview, Iris. I have Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters by Carla Kaplan in my collection, and her Miss Anne in Harlem has been on my TBR list for a while.