Don't Tell Alfred

Bill Brandt, Maid at a Window, 1947

By Nancy Mitford, Intro. by Selina Hastings, New York, Vintage, 2010, p. 229

The final installment of Mitford's trilogy, Don't Tell Alfred, opens in the years following the World Wars.  Fanny, the confident wife of an Oxford don, Alfred, is the narrator and main protagonist.  Alfred is appointed British Ambassador to Paris, and Fanny struggles to cope with the beau monde in Paris and politics within the embassy.  Her goal is to solve problems without attracting the attention of her husband ("Don't tell Alfred" warn the characters.)  

This book lacks the zip of the earlier novels.  In the first two books, Mitford presents a sophisticated aristocratic milieu cut free from the narrow bourgeois norms of domesticity: for example, women freely discard lovers in search of their heart's true desire, homosexual liaisons are accepted, and children are raised by a wide circle of care givers.  Here, in Don't Tell Alfred, the post-war society leaves Fanny in the dust.  The contours of privilege have shifted, but Fanny seems stuck in the old order. Mitford's trilogy begins with tales of amusing eccentrics and end with stories of  mass culture overtaking the protagonists. The post-war era saw the rise of consumer society, and during this time, cultural impetus shifted away from valorizing members of high society and towards a shared, pop culture.  

In the wake of WWII, Americans were newly prominent abroad, and Mitford takes a few swipes at the unwanted presence of Americans in European capitals.  To Mitford, France represented the very best of Western Civilization and America was a land of loud-mouthed barbarians.  As an American all I can say is that's OK, babe, Americans may be louts, but unlike some of  your family we're typically neither fascists (Diana Mitford) nor BFFs with Hitler (Unity and Diana Mitford).