Tag Archives: Nancy Mitford

#BookReview ‘The Blessing’ by Nancy Mitford #satire #historical

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The Blessing by Nancy Mitford tells of the wartime romance and marriage of young Englishwoman Grace Allingham and dashing Frenchman Charles-Edouard de Valhubert. Both are aristocratic but from completely different backgrounds. How, you wonder, could this marriage possibly work. Mitford has great fun with the gulf of understanding between the two nationalities, still recovering after the war. Nancy MitfordAt the beginning of the war, Grace’s fiancé Hughie goes off to fight. Despite being engaged, she falls head over heels in love with the flirtatious Frenchman Charles-Edouard and marries him. A fortnight after their wedding, Charles-Edouard returns to Cairo. Nine months later, Grace gives birth to a boy, Sigismond. The war years pass by. Grace ‘lived in a dream of Charles-Edouard, so that as the years went by he turned, in her mind, into somebody quite divorced from all reality and quite different from the original.’ Even when peace is declared, Charles-Edouard’s return is announced and delayed, announced and delayed. Always, there is a gap between expectation and reality. Not all is as it seems.
When he finally returns, he collects his wife and now five-year-old son and takes them to live in France, first at the family seat Bellandargues in Southern France, later in Paris. And now the English/French comedy begins as Grace, and her English Nanny, adapt to French cuisine, foreign customs and the shockingly decadent manners and unspoken rules of French society.
When Grace discovers the truth of her husband’s idea of marriage – including a permanent mistress and various casual affairs – she returns to her father’s London home with Sigi in tow. And now the funniest part of the novel begins. As both sides of the family encourage the couple to reconcile, Sigi is convinced he will benefit materially from having two separate parents, gaining more attention, more gifts and general spoiling. And so he proves himself efficiently cunning in keeping his parents apart.
It took me a long time to work out the meaning of the title, so I won’t give away the secret here. I found the start slow but the question of if and when Grace will realise the truth of Charles-Edouard kept me reading, until I realised I wanted them to reunite. The funniest characters are Sigi – who I wanted to slap whilst at the same time cheerfully cheering him on – and Nanny, who stoutly refuses French food and cooks in the nursery over a spirit lamp.
Written from personal experience – Mitford both lived in Paris and had a long affair with a Frenchman – I found the humour unsentimental and non-PC so perhaps the funnier for that.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Read my reviews of these other novels by Nancy Mitford:-
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
HIGHLAND FLING
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
THE BLESSING
THE PURSUIT OF LOVE
WIGS ON THE GREEN

Read the first paragraph of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE here.

If you like this, try:-
‘How to Stop Time’ by Matt Haig
‘Stanley and Elsie’ by Nicola Upson
‘Mothering Sunday’ by Graham Swift

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE BLESSING by Nancy Mitford https://wp.me/p5gEM4-46K via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Love in a Cold Climate’ by Nancy Mitford #satire #historical

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A companion novel to The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford is a tale of a group of aristocratic families, told by narrator Fanny Wincham. Both novels are stories about other people, rather than about Fanny herself. Love in a Cold Climate is about Lady Leopoldina ‘Polly’ Hampton and, like all Mitford’s novels, there is a satire in her portrayal of the whims and foibles of the English upper class. It is like reading of a lost world though the satire in this novel is less biting than her earlier novels. Nancy MitfordMitford does create unforgettable characters. Not Fanny who, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, is something of a transparent uncomplicated observer, but Lady Montdore and Cedric are both memorable, especially when seen together. The novel finally takes off with the appearance of Cedric but there is quite a lot of background to set up before this point is reached. In a modern novel, the background would be slipped in carefully so allowing the story’s conflict to be quickly addressed.
Eighteen-year old Fanny lives with relatives due to the absence of her separated parents. Among her neighbours are the Montdores of Hampton near Oxford, recently returned from India where Lord Montdore was viceroy. Polly, also eighteen, reflects on the differing nature of love in a hot, and a cold climate. In the early pages Polly’s mother Lady Montdore despairs of her daughter ever falling in love with a young man and giving birth to the next heir of the Montdore fortune. Unfortunately for them, their only child Polly falls in love with an unsuitable older man. A family rift ensues, Polly is disinherited and flees abroad with her new husband. Into this vacuum arrives the new heir, a distant relative from the Canadian branch of the family. Cedric is something of a surprise and Fanny, expecting the Montdores to hate him on sight, watches with amazement as the foppish outrageous Cedric wins a place in their hearts. When Polly returns from Sicily, she finds a changed world.
This is not a plot-driven novel which at times was frustrating, leaving me with the feeling that the narrative was drifting along. This is remedied with the arrival of conflict, ie Cedric, who comes alive off the page. I did long to hear the internal monologues of Cedric and Lady Montdore; not of Polly though, who remains a rather flat uninspiring character. I started reading the novel thinking it was Polly’s story, but finishing it thinking it was about her mother and Cedric. Not as laugh-out-loud as Mitford’s earlier novels.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Read my reviews of these other novels by Nancy Mitford:-
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
HIGHLAND FLING
PIGEON PIE
THE BLESSING
THE PURSUIT OF LOVE
WIGS ON THE GREEN

Read the first paragraph of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE here.

If you like this, try these:-
‘Half of the Human Race’ by Anthony Quinn
‘The Long View’ by Elizabeth Howard
‘Amy Snow’ by Tracy Rees 

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE by Nancy Mitford https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3U2 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Pursuit of Love’ by Nancy Mitford #romance

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A slower, more meditative pace inhabits The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, less frenetic than her earlier novels. More fond, less satirical. Fanny Logan narrates this story of the Radlett family and, in particular, her cousin Linda’s pursuit of love. Nancy MitfordThe teenage Linda and sisters, and cousin Fanny who visits the Radletts at the fading freezing family pile, Alconleigh in the Cotswolds, want to grow up now. They are obsessed by sex and romance whilst being woefully ignorant of the practicalities. The reality, however, is more difficult and less romantic than they imagined. They form a secret society The Hons. When not out hunting, The Hons spend hours in a large warm cupboard gossiping about love and Fanny’s disreputable mother, ‘The Bolter’, who abandoned her daughter to pursue love. Fanny, raised by her Aunt Emily and stepfather Davey, spends all her holidays at Alconleigh with Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie and their family.
As with all Mitford novels there are many laugh-out-loud moments. Alconleigh is an eccentric world where Uncle Matthew rules his staff and family; he despises foreigners, Catholics, the nouveaux riche and people who say ‘perfume’ instead of ‘scent’. Desperate to find true love and not follow the family black sheep – The Bolter – into leapfrogging from affair to affair, the cousins are woefully naïve and unprepared for meeting men. Linda sums up true love, ‘it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can’t imagine how you ever mistook that person for him.’
Published in 1945, the story starts in the Thirties and runs through the Spanish Civil War and the start of World War Two and The Blitz. The Radletts may be ‘hons’ but they suffer and slings and arrows of fortune in love. Fanny is the narrator of the family’s story and we are treated to occasional morsels about her own love and life. Like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, the story therefore includes Fanny’s own interpretation of affairs as well as her recounting of Linda’s own stories.
This is a tale of lost aristocracy, and the levelling effects of love and war. Funny, witty and sharp featuring an absent parenting style completely alien today, The Pursuit of Love has at its heart a strong streak of sadness and tragedy. No matter who you are, love cannot always be found; if found, it cannot always be retained.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Read the first paragraph of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE here.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Nancy Mitford:-
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
HIGHLAND FLING
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
PIGEON PIE
THE BLESSING
WIGS ON THE GREEN

If you like this, try these:-
‘Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day’ by Winifred Watson
‘The Ballroom’ by Anna Hope
‘My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You’ by Louisa Young

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3kq via @SandraDanby

Great Opening Paragraph 120… ‘The Pursuit of Love’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling in on knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa’s eleven and Matt’s two years, sit around the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.” Nancy MitfordFrom ‘The Pursuit of Love’ by Nancy Mitford

Read my reviews of these novels by Nancy Mitford:-
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
HIGHLAND FLING
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
PIGEON PIE
THE BLESSING
THE PURSUIT OF LOVE
WIGS ON THE GREEN

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Long Drop’ by Louisa Mina 
‘Original Sin’ by PD James 
‘Lucky You’ by Carl Hiassen 

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3JC via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Pigeon Pie’ by Nancy Mitford #satire #historical

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Pigeon Pie, the fourth novel of Nancy Mitford, was first published in 1940 by Hamish Hamilton. This was a serious error by its publisher given that Mitford wrote this light-hearted satire about wartime spying just before World War Two broke out in 1939. Not surprisingly, it was a commercial miss. Which is a shame. It is a funny, more tightly-plotted and disciplined novel than her first three and is a transition between her pre-war and post-war novels. Nancy MitfordAt the outbreak of war, Lady Sophia Garfield enrols at her nearest First Aid Post and is put in charge of the office, folding and counting laundry and taking telephone calls. As the book is set during the first few months of war, the Phoney War, not a lot happens for Sophia except endless first aid drills. She teases an acquaintance, Olga – who poses in the press as a mysterious Mata Hari figure – and lunches with inept friends Ned and Fred who work at the Ministry of Information. Then Sophia stumbles on a nest of spies; or counter-spies, or counter-counter spies, she’s not sure which.
Although her characters seem of a type with those of her first three novels – Mitford has a reputation for writing about the upper class, their extravagant and thoughtless lifestyles – in Pigeon Pie they are less cartoonish. Sophia particularly is interesting, drawn as she is into different worlds: her husband Luke’s enthusiasm for a new American religion, the Boston Brotherhood, brings new friends to dinner and a lodger upstairs; her godfather Sir Ivor King, aka The King of Song, disappears; journalist Rudolph Jocelyn enlists; and Sister Wordsworth at the Post is jolly and efficient about bandages and disinfectants and such like. Mitford weaves a plot of spies, kidnapping, bombs, code and general sneaking around, despite Sophia being unable to remember Morse Code and seeing codes in innocent messages.
This had me chuckling aloud.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Read my reviews of these other novels by Nancy Mitford:-
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
HIGHLAND FLING
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
THE BLESSING
THE PURSUIT OF LOVE
WIGS ON THE GREEN

Read the first paragraph of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE here.

If you like this, try these:-
‘The Paying Guests’ by Sarah Waters
‘The Heat of the Day’ by Elizabeth Bowen
‘The Slaves of Solitude’ by Patrick Hamilton

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview PIGEON PIE by Nancy Mitford https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3h2 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Wigs on the Green’ by Nancy Mitford #humour #satire

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When office worker Noel Foster inherits three thousand three hundred and fourteen pounds from an aunt and sets his heart on finding a girl to marry, his friend tells him, ‘It’s such a fearful gamble. Much better put the money on a horse and be out of your misery at once.’ And so starts Wigs on the Green, the third novel by Nancy Mitford. But as well as a social satire of the upper class circles in which she moved, as in her previous novels, in Wigs on the Green Mitford had a more personal target in mind: the fascist pretensions of her sisters Unity and Diana. The sisters disliked the novel; it caused a family rift and was not republished within Mitford’s lifetime [she died in 1973]. Nancy Mitford Money and sex are at the heart of the story; the spending and gaining of money, the marrying into money, and the pursuit of sex seemingly regardless of the eligibility and marital status of the intended. Noel and his friend Jasper Aspect go to Chalford in search of the young heiress, Eugenia Malmains. Their first glimpse of the over-enthusiastic fascism-obsessed Eugenia is as she gives a public speech on behalf of the Union Jack Movement to the Chalford villagers, ‘Britons, awake! Arise! Oh, British lion!’. This is the first of Mitford’s novels to transition from the Twenties, with tales of the chaotic partying and shenanigans of the Bright Young Things, into the Thirties and the rising threat of fascism in Europe. The fascination with National Socialism, the jackboots and roaring nationalism portrayed in Wigs on the Green was actually happening as the blackshirts of Oswald Mosley – husband of Mitford’s sister Diana – gained in popularity. Read today, this is still funny but I also found uncomfortable parallels with the 21st century nationalism of Brexit. For this reason alone, Wigs on the Green is worth reading. Mitford excels at comic portrayals of characters verging on ridiculous but with the capacity for self-deception we may recognise in real people.
Noel falls in lust with local beauty Mrs Lace. Meanwhile, two mysterious young ladies, Miss Smith and Miss Jones, check into the village pub The Jolly Roger, soon followed by two men in raincoats. The two men, and two women, all suspect these to be detectives. As Noel starts to resent the way Jasper runs up bills on Noel’s tab and not his own, Jasper mischievously hints to Mrs Lace that Noel is something other than he appears. He likes to be treated as a normal person, he hints, because of course he is very special. This leads her to believe Noel is an exiled Balkan prince. Noel and Jasper sign up for Eugenia’s party and are now addressed by her as Union Jackshirt Foster and Union Jackshirt Aspect. Meanwhile Eugenia is brought into conflict with friends of Mrs Lace, the thespians and artists from nearby Rackenbridge. As political differences widen and unsuitable sexual conquests are sought, the climax comes at an event originally intended as Eugenia’s coming-out party – a pageant at Chalford Park when everyone comes together to act out the visit of George III and Queen Charlotte – which evolves into a Union Jack Movement event instead. Chaos is the result.
There are moments of sharp social observation and moments that made me chuckle. The political satire is cutting, but stays in the background; Mitford had to tread a fine line in order to avoid being sued by her brother-in-law.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Nancy Mitford:-
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
HIGHLAND FLING
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
PIGEON PIE
THE BLESSING
THE PURSUIT OF LOVE

Read the first paragraph of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE here.

If you like this, try these:-
‘The Light Years’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard
‘The Secrets of Gaslight Lane’ by MRC Kasasian
‘The Bone Church’ by Victoria Dougherty

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview WIGS ON THE GREEN by Nancy Mitford https://wp.me/p5gEM4-340 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Christmas Pudding’ by Nancy Mitford #satire #historical

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Christmas Pudding is another between-the-wars comedy of manners by Nancy Mitford. With scathing observation at times as sharp as Jane Austen, Mitford introduces a new character, Lord Lewes: ‘He was tall, very correctly dressed in a style indicating the presence of money rather than of imagination, and had a mournful, thin, eighteenth-century face.’ This is her second novel and features some of the personalities featured in her first, Highland Fling, though familiarity with the first is not essential for enjoyment. Nancy MitfordThe action takes place over one month around Christmas, the pudding of the title refers to Mitford’s mixture of personalities in two house parties in the Cotswold countryside. Paul Fotheringay, whose debut literary novel has been heralded as a comic farce, is desperate to escape London and find inspiration for his next book. Wanting to be taken seriously as an author, he settles on a biography of Victorian poet, Lady Maria Bobbin. When he is refused access to the diaries by the current Lady Bobbin he conjures a plot with her teenage son Bobby to masquerade as Bobby’s tutor over the Christmas holidays and so gain secret access to the diaries. And so Paul becomes part of a love triangle at the Bobbin’s home Compton Bobbin, involving Bobby’s sister Philadelphia and the honest, boring but reliable Lord Michael Lewes. The second house party, at the rather kitsch over-furnished Mulberrie Farm, is held by former prostitute and now society lady Amabelle Fortescue. Mitford’s characters move in the same overlapping social circles so it is inevitable that Amabelle and her guests Sally and Walter Monteath will socialize with some of the guests at Compton Bobbin.
Love is the central theme, true love, idealised love, upper-class arranged marriage and marriage for pragmatic facing-old-age reasons. As has always occurred in aristocratic circles, marriage is approached with a healthy dose of pragmatism making romantic love seem frothier and more idealised than ever.
This is light-hearted fiction and limited in its observation of characters; there is no upstairs/downstairs contrast here, which would enrich the social commentary. But the old and young are perfectly capable of condemning themselves out of their own mouths. Reading this novel will not change your life, but it will amuse you and the ending is not the easy way-out you may expect. My one criticism is that there are slightly too many peripheral characters with their own strings of plot.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Nancy Mitford:-
HIGHLAND FLING
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
PIGEON PIE
THE BLESSING
THE PURSUIT OF LOVE
WIGS ON THE GREEN

Read the first paragraph of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE here.

If you like this, try these:-
‘Sweet Caress’ by William Boyd
‘A Death in the Dales’ by Frances Brody
‘Mothering Sunday’ by Graham Swift

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview CHRISTMAS PUDDING by Nancy Mitford http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2UO via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Highland Fling’ by Nancy Mitford #satire #historical

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First published in 1931, Highland Fling is the first novel by Nancy Mitford and the first I have read, determined to read them in order. What a breath of fresh air it was after reading two detailed historical novels, this light frothy concoction made me chuckle. Nancy MitfordAn amusing observer of manners, Mitford excels at that peculiar type of incomplete conversation between two people gossiping about mutual acquaintances in which each completes the other’s sentences. This is a novel of its time, upperclass wealth, upperclass lack of wealth, centuries of families and traditions the roots of which have been forgotten, and the juxtaposition of bluff country old-timers with Bright Young Things from London. Highland Fling is set in a Scottish castle, a closed-room setting, loved by crime writers, which Mitford uses mercilessly to compare and contrast. It is a world with which the author knows well and at which she gently pokes fun.
Young artist Alfred Gates returns from Paris to London and visits his newly-married friends Walter and Sally. Sally’s parents are called away and the three friends go to Scotland to host the parent’s shooting party. As well as the shooting guests, including stodgy old-fashioned military and aristocratic types, the younger guests include Jane Dacre who fancies herself in love with the effete Albert. Albert, who dresses in brightly-coloured flamboyant clothing which offends the traditionalists, searches Dalloch Castle for examples of Victorian decorative accessories which he photographs for his book. While the shooting guests are up at dawn and tramp around the moorland, the youngsters rise at midday and drink champagne for breakfast. Teasing, of old by young, is inevitable with the hapless victims suspicious but unable to produce proof of their tormenters. Mitford mines the humour by placing both groups in close proximity and letting them clash, on a shoot, and a visit to the local highland games.
As a first novel this gave me a taster of Mitford’s acerbic wit and observation of social manners, acute in its sharpness of both old and young, wealthy and not, though crude in some instances.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Read my reviews of these other novels by Nancy Mitford:-
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
PIGEON PIE
THE BLESSING
THE PURSUIT OF LOVE
WIGS ON THE GREEN

Read the first paragraph of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE here.

If you like this, try:-
‘Curtain Call’ by Anthony Quinn
‘Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day’ by Winifred Watson
‘Quartet’ by Jean Rhys

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HIGHLAND FLING by Nancy Mitford http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2TH via @SandraDanby