The Pursuit of Love

Cecil Beaton (looks like Franz Xaver Winterhalter), Nancy Mitford and Friends, 1931

By Nancy Mitford, intro. by Zoe Heller, New York, Vintage, 2010, p. 214

There is no American equivalent to Nancy Mitford much less the Mitford sisters.  I encountered her stories by watching Masterpiece Theater in the 1980s, and I was bowled over.  Her upper-crust world of fox-hunting, country manors with names, and Paris flats couldn't be more alien to the San Gabriel Valley I grew up in.  I quickly read all of Mitford's novels that I could find along with her Francophile biographies of Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, and Voltaire.  Her aesthetic universe is all artful frothiness, and I was smitten by her grace.  Mitford's style is like that of Anita Loos in its charming wit and dark undertones.  As I revisit her work now, some thirty years later, I'm blinded by class.  Henry Green, another member of the Bright Young Things in inter-war London with Mitford, lived in a world that at least acknowledged the existence of those "down stairs."

Seen through the eyes of Fanny, we meet the Radetts, an eccentric, aristocratic English family.  Uncle Matthew is a blustering tyrant who hunts the children when the foxes are few.  Aunt Sadie is a remote mother of seven children.  Fanny is best friends with one of the daughters named Linda, a beautiful young woman who falls in love with a Germanic Tory, a Communist and a rich French duke.  The Pursuit of Love is the first book of a trilogy that includes Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred. 

It feels petulant to complain that Mitford is an elite snob.  Of course!  I don't hold that against M. Proust afterall.  I think its Mitford's articulation of a code that serves to exclude the "Hons" from the rest that puts me off.  Her stories are life-affirming but she's relentlessly exclusive and intolerant.  Linda doesn't even love her own daughter, Moira.  She's just not a Hon. Mitford's world is shinny bright, but its only for the lucky few.