Mosley, Lady Diana

▪ 2004

Diana Freeman-Mitford 

      British socialite (b. June 17, 1910, London, Eng.—d. Aug. 11, 2003, Paris, France), was the third and most beautiful of the six celebrated Mitford sisters and the wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (1932–40) and the Union Movement (1948–80). The dazzling and witty Mitford girls, along with their brother, Tom, had a lively and eccentric childhood, which Nancy memorialized in semiautobiographical novels, notably Love in a Cold Climate. In 1929 Diana, despite the initial objections of her parents, married Bryan Guinness, of the wealthy and aristocratic Guinness brewing dynasty. Three years later she left him for Mosley, whom she married in 1936 at the house of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as an honoured guest. During World War II the Mosleys were held in Holloway Prison (1940–43) and under house arrest (1943–45); they moved to France in the early 1950s. Diana Mosley edited The European, a right-wing magazine, and wrote a biography of the duchess of Windsor as well as two volumes of memoirs, A Life of Contrasts (1977) and Loved Ones (1985). Even after her husband's death in 1980, she remained a committed fascist and readily acknowledged that although Hitler had done “terrible things,” she was “very, very fond” of him.

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