Diana, from an obituary:
"It was in this period of her first marriage that Evelyn Waugh met Diana. Like many young men, he was smitten by her, stating that her beauty ran through the room like a peal of bells, and he dedicated his second novel Vile Bodies to her. In the period when she was running after Sir Oswald, Waugh seems to have largely avoided her, and later still circumstances were against a friendship such as that he enjoyed with her sister Nancy. In a letter of 9th March 1966, a month before he died, Waugh tried to answer the question Diana had obviously put to him - why had their friendship petered out? He states that it was
Pure jealousy. You (and Bryan) were immensely kind to me at a time when I greatly needed kindness, after my desertion by my first wife. I was infatuated with you. Not of course that I aspired to your bed but I wanted you to myself as especial confidante and comrade. After Jonathan’s birth you began to enlarge your circle. I felt lower in your affections than Harold Acton or Robert Byron and I couldn’t compete or take a humbler place. That is the sad and sordid truth.
Then in what was probably his last letter (30th March 1966) Waugh explained to her that Lucy Simmons in his novella Work Suspended was not a cruel portrait of her at the time they were close, though Lucy like Diana was pregnant. He had just used details of pregnancy that he did not know about until he observed Diana’s.
Her relations with her sisters were not entirely smooth. Pamela, the equable, capable one, was a consolation in times of stress; and Deborah, the youngest one who became the Duchess of Devonshire, was always friendly and helpful. Unity had been closest to Diana perhaps, but she had shot herself when Britain declared war on Germany and died disabled nine years later. During the war the oldest sister, Nancy, wrote to the government to warn ministers of Diana’s dangerous predilections and to advise them to keep her in prison, but this unaffectionate act did not stop them from resuming their friendship afterwards. Diana helped to nurse Nancy through her long and agonising final illness before she died in 1973. Jessica, however, had become a Communist and lived in the United States where she and her second husband engaged in labour politics. Diana and she could see little that was creditable in the other and never regained intimacy. At the end of the war Jessica declared that the Mosleys should be thrown back into prison permanently, and the political gulf between them meant that her portrait of Diana in her autobiography Hons and Rebels (1960) was unsympathetic."
