Jessica Mitford  Jessica Lucy 'Decca' Freeman-Mitford (11 September 1917 – 23 July 1996) was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics. Jessica, who represented the far left, married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, killed in World War II, and then American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, with whom she joined the American Communist Party and worked closely in the Civil Rights Congress. Both refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, but later resigned from the party out of disillusion with Stalinism. Her memoirs "Hons and Rebels", and a social commentary "The American Way of Death", both became classics. Born at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, the sixth of seven children, Jessica Mitford was the daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney (daughter of politician and publisher Thomas Bowles), and grew up in a series of her father's country houses. She had little formal education, but nevertheless did a great deal of reading. Her sisters Unity and Diana were well-known members of the British Union of Fascists and ultimately became close friends of Adolf Hitler. Diana even married the British Union of Fascists' Leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. Upon the outbreak of war between the UK and Nazi Germany, Unity tried to commit suicide in Munich and Diana and her husband were interned without trial for the duration of the war. Jessica (always known as Decca) later described her father as "one of nature's fascists", renounced her privileged background at an early age and became an adherent of Stalinism. She was known as the "red sheep" of the family. At the age of 19, Mitford met her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was recuperating from dysentery caught during a stint with the International Brigades defending Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Romilly was a nephew (by marriage) of Winston Churchill. The cousins immediately fell in love and decided to elope to Spain, where Romilly picked up work as a reporter for the "News Chronicle". After some legal difficulties caused by their relatives' opposition, they married. They moved to London and lived in the East End, then mostly a poor industrial area. Mitford gave birth at home to a daughter, Julia Decca Romilly, on 20 December 1937. The baby died in a measles epidemic the following May. Jessica Mitford rarely spoke of Julia in later life and she is not referred to by name in Mitford's 1960 autobiography, "Hons and Rebels".