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Reading the letters of the Mitford sisters is like living inside a vibrantly written, erudite and witty Masterpiece Theater series about six extraordinary (or, to use a Mitfordian word, extraorder) Englishwomen.

The varied lives of the upper-class Mitfords link the reader, intimately and in an everyday way, to a vast range of world events and to the dramas and comedies of the 20th century. The sisters had, among them, friendships with Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Charles de Gaulle, Christian Dior, John F. Kennedy, Lucian Freud, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and other Royals, peers and world leaders (including Adolf Hitler). The reader meets all these, plus numerous others, through almost 80 years of letters. Because the medium is personal correspondence, there is none of the name-dropping that sometimes overwhelms memoir, biography and autobiography.

• The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley, HarperCollins, 834 pages, $46.95

Charlotte Mosley, publisher, journalist and daughter-in-law of the late Lady Diana Mitford Guinness Mosley, has, with skill and disciplined love, selected 5 per cent of the 12,000 letters that flowed between pairs of Mitford sisters from 1925 to 2003.

If all their epistolary exchanges had been included, we would have had more than four million words. And I would have spent much of the rest of my life reading them, because, with this enormous book, I have entered Mitfordland and connected to its people. I can see this transition when I look over my notes, in which "Jessica/ Deborah" changes to "Decca/Debo": two of the many nicknames the Mitford sisters had for one another.

And letters Most of us now live with inboxes overflowing with hundreds of e-mails, the IT equivalent of a messy dorm. I miss letters. I think we need them. More precisely, we need to keep the skill and richness of letter writing, though time and work do not permit a Mitfordian output.

Above all, this book opens up a world that is gone, though even in its own time, not the world of most: Deborah, 1937: "It is more than ever a Russian novel here ... Farve has taken terrific trouble to buy things he thinks Muv will love and she goes round putting all the things away that he has chosen ... she said 'I certainly never bought these horrors' & Farve's face fell several miles ... the Hitler tea party was fascinating. Bobo [Unity] was like someone transformed ... she was shaking so much she could hardly walk. Muv asked [Hitler] whether there were any laws about having good bread. ... Love from André Gide."

“ All the sisters, after various false starts, fell in love with strong, even bullying, men ”

The Mitford letters are always tenderly and protectively familial at their core, even when one sibling is competitive with another, or is insulted by a published reference or horrified by a sibling's socio-political choices.

The range of socio-political choices alone qualifies the Mitfords as a "six-off."

Unity: dedicated Nazi (in much the flushed and hyperventilating way that screaming rock fans are dedicated musicologists). Diana: the wife and loyal helpmeet of Sir Oswald Mosley, brown-shirted leader of the pro-Hitler British Union of Fascists (and one of the first to work for a united Europe). Jessica (Decca) Mitford Romilly Truehaft: a lifelong Communist, popular and humorously ironic chronicler of American funerals and lefty foibles (Hons and Rebels, The American Way of Death, A Fine Old Conflict). Nancy: the most skilled and celebrated author of the sextet; a witty and gifted journalist, novelist, memoirist and play-translator (e.g., Noblesse Oblige, Love in a Cold Climate, The Little Hut); a reflexive snob, with the casual racism of her time and class; a couturier-addicted francophile, writing more and more in franglais; a woman whose chic and arch brittleness cannot mask her persisting love of a philandering Gaullist colonel who includes her in his coterie of women - in some measure, one suspects, for her social and literary cachet. Pamela: The ruralist who loves dogs, horses and chickens, and is not drawn to the Big Parade of leaders, male lovers and idols that shape the lives of her sisters. Deborah Cavendish: Duchess of Devonshire; the youngest and only living Mitford sister.

Deborah is the finest letter-writer of them (even better than her writer sisters Nancy and Jessica), in part because of her clear-eyed but generous love for her sisters, her parents and all manner of other feisty people, and her ability to create word-pictures of them that are visually rich, sometimes critical and concerned, but never petty.

All the sisters, after various false starts, fell in love with strong, even bullying, men, in the image of "Farve," their handsome, combative and authoritarian father, whom only the caustically witty Nancy would challenge. Their back-and-forth-verbal jousts were a source of delight to the other girls, but not anything they were willing to try.

Unity Mitford had a groupie crush on Hitler, with whom her relationship was most probably chaste. She had affairs with various SS and other Nazi acolytes, but these affairs were in loco Führer, whom she regularly describes thus: "his kind face," "Thank God for Adolf Hitler," "Of course, they are mad to get to the Führer. But then who isn't?" and "I have seen the Führer a lot lately, which has been heaven." Unity's are full of an equally breathy exultation about popular novels ("Have you read Gone with the Wind? It is the most fascinating book ever written. I read it in under a week although it's got 1036 pages & you know what a slow reader I am, so that just shows. One can't put it down.")

Hitlermania caused Unity to move to Munich, and to write more and more in Germanglish, much as Nancy Mitford's letters later verged on franglais. As war between England and Germany drew nearer, Unity grew increasingly agitated. When war was declared, she shot herself in the head, in a Munich park. The suicide attempt failed, but the harm to her brain and general health was permanent. The always girlish Unity became an agitated and unfocused child, cared for by her mother. She died a few years later.

The sisters experienced aging with mostly humorous crotchets. Here's Nancy on a visit from her ex-husband Peter Rodd, whom she called "Prod': He "fills the house with terrible drinkers who spend their time telephoning and going to my loo. ... I have become old maidish."

Nancy died in 1973, followed by Pamela (1994), Jessica (1996) and Diana (2003).

At 78, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, is the last Mitford. Her septuagenarian letters to and from Diana Mosley are filled with reminiscence, love and loss. They are deeply moving, and the proper ending to a remarkable collection that beautifully manages depth and intimacy without that eeky-peeky-creepy invasiveness that often marks our current no-need-to-think rapid-fire correspondence.

Will there be compilations of e-mails? Outside our inboxes and My Google SpaceFace? Probably. Will they be as good as the letters of the Mitfords? Not often.

If you love letter-writing, well-turned sentences or history, or simply wish to enter a world, learn its language and get to know its people, I unstintingly recommend this book. Even when philosophically exasperating, it is a treasure trove.

Contributing reviewer Gale Zoë Garnett (whose current book is Room Tone), missing England and family-deficient, has watched all of Upstairs Downstairs three times.