Do Admit!
The Mitford Sisters and Me

Drawn & Quarterly 2025

  • Five blue stars on a white background.

    “A spectacular, dizzying romp through the tumult of the twentieth century. Her kinetic drawings and boisterous, endlessly inventive layouts somehow bring coherence to the sprawling, branching plots of her subjects’ lives. The visual world Pond creates is phantasmagoric, drawing on deep veins of vintage graphic design. And her grip on the words is equally deft. She’s clearly spent so much time steeping in the rich textual legacy that this family has left the world—their books, letters and secret family lingo—that she begins to sound suspiciously like a seventh member of this sophisticated and scandalous sorority. Brava.”

    - Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

  • Five blue stars in a row on a white background

    “Whether you know nothing (or everything) about the infamous Mitfords you will be wildly entertained by this exhaustive tome about them. A massive work almost big enough to encompass the enormous egos and lives of these fascinating (and sometimes frightening) woman. Told with wry charm and wit (the kind the Mitfords themselves might have appreciated) and endlessly visually-inventive. It is the sort of historical biography that will remind you that, yes, truth is always stranger than fiction.”

    - Seth, Clyde Fans

  • Five blue stars aligned horizontally.

    “Mimi Pond’s Do Admit is a dazzling, acrobatic swirl of graphic invention. It mingles the fascinating story of the famous, fabulous sisters with scenes from the author’s glamour-starved childhood in 1950s San Diego. Pond’s dry humour fits seamlessly with that of her eccentric British characters, but she is at her empathetic best portraying the heartbreaking losses and turns of fortune they endure. Her love for them shines forth from every page.”

    - Maurice Vellekoop, I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together

Illustration of the MITFORD sisters in a blue-toned room with large windows overlooking a landscape. Four women are sitting or lying on a window seat, one woman is reading, one is writing, one is holding a cup, and a child is lying on the floor reading.

Mimi Pond crafts a gorgeous, dazzling biography of the Mitford Sisters

Born with pedigrees but without the pocketbooks to match, The Mitfords were certainly no strangers to lies, intrigue, or scandal. Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. All six sisters were weaned on their family’s well-documented upper class eccentricities: a ne’er do well would-be entrepreneur father; a stern, stiff-upper-lipped mother; a revolving door of governesses of varying propriety, all against the backdrop of a crumbling estate falling into disrepair.

A grid of nine cartoon-style portraits, each with a speech or thought bubble containing advice about girls and women, with some referencing boys. The portraits feature different girls, each with distinct facial expressions, hairstyles, and accessories, all in shades of blue.

The sisters grew from cloistered turn-of-the-century country girls into debutantes who would marry into political influence—for better or worse. Is it any wonder that a young, working class Mimi in Southern California becomes enamored with The Mitfords’ downright fanciful rich-and-famous lifestyle? This charming, inventively cartooned, and lovingly researched biography captures the dramatic, over-the-top antics of high society’s strongest personalities as they rubbed elbows with some of history’s most infamous fascists and communists.

Pond’s genius for classic cartooning in the vein of the Vanity Fair caricature and the satirical illustrations of Charles Addams brings the aesthetic decadence of the 1920s and ‘30s to life with effortless aplomb, warts and all.

See Inside