Fact v. Fiction: Just How Accurate Is ‘Outrageous’ as a Portrait of the Mitford Sisters?

Diana, Jessica, Unity, Nancy, Deborah, and Pamela Mitford were six of the most talked-about women of their time, so it’s natural to wonder whether all of the stories in Sarah Williams’s screenplay—based on Mary S. Lovell’s 2001 book The Mitford Girls—are actually taken from real life. Well, fear not; we’re here to sort out all the fact vs. fiction so that you can enjoy your viewing of the first two episodes of Outrageous without constantly pulling up Wikipedia to verify just how big of a fascist Diana Mitford actually was. (Spoiler: A really big one.) Find everything you need to know about the real-life history behind Outrageous below:

Was Diana Mitford really married to one of the richest men in London?

Well, yes! Before Diana wed Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, her first husband was Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne and the Guinness family brewing fortune. Guinness was one of London’s “Bright Young Things,” a group of aristocrats and socialites given that name by the tabloids because of their penchant for partying, drinking, and drug use; and the Guinness family’s net worth would have been around $983 million today, making Diana’s first husband undoubtedly one of the richest and most eligible men in her peer group at the time they met.

Was Nancy Mitford’s fiancé Hamish Erskine really gay?

Erskine was, indeed, as “out” as it was possible to be in pre-WWII England, even engaging in an affair with Nancy’s brother, Tom Mitford, while at Eton College. Still, he captured Nancy’s heart; the male lead in Nancy’s first novel, Highland Fling, is based on Erskine. “Hamish was a perfectly ghastly character,” art historian and The Horror of Love author Lisa Hilton told the New Zealand Herald recently. “But Nancy was still quite prim and spinsterish and I do wonder if there wasn’t some sort of subliminal self-protection, because she spent so long with him. By not getting married, as her contemporaries did, very early in their 20s, she sort of preserved herself. She did have many more suitable men who wanted to marry her but she carried on with the giggling Hamish. I think that says a lot about her own sexual issues … perhaps she didn’t want to get married.”

Did hunger marchers really come to the Mitfords’ doorstep?

There’s no specific evidence to suggest that hunger marchers actually protested outside the Mitfords’ family home (as they’re seen doing in Outrageous), but known pacifist Jessica Mitford developed her keen sense of social justice early in her life, and in her 1960 autobiography Hons and Rebels, she describes the political landscape of London thusly: “Hunger marches, at first small demonstrations, later involving populations of whole areas, were reported in the papers…Old concepts of patriotism, flag-waving, jingoism were under violent attack by the younger writers. The creed of pacifism, born of a determination to escape the horrors of a new world war, swept the youth. I responded, like many another of my generation, by becoming first a convinced pacifist, then quickly graduating to socialist ideas.”

Were Unity and Jessica Mitford really close?

It might seem surprising that Unity and Jessica were so close, given the extreme divergence in their politics, but the way they’re depicted shopping, strolling, and debating serious ideas together on Outrageous is grounded in real life. Born three years apart (Unity in 1914, Jessica in 1917), the two shared a bedroom growing up, with Jessica’s side decorated with hammer and sickles and pictures of Vladimir Lenin and Unity’s decorated with swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler. However, their relationship would also be marked by periods of estrangement.

Did Unity Mitford really have a pet rat?

Apparently so, according to Lauren Young’s 2022 book Hitler’s Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII, which notes that Unity “attended balls with her pet snake, Enid, around her neck and let loose her rat, Ratular, when things got boring, which they invariably did.”