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. 
At 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.
BUY THE BOOK
Read my reviews of Mitford’s earlier novels:-
Highland Fling
Christmas Pudding
Wigs on the Green
Pigeon Pie
The Pursuit of Love
Love in a Cold Climate
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:
THE BLESSING by Nancy Mitford #bookreview https://wp.me/p5gEM4-46K via @SandraDanby
Friends in Low Places by Simon Raven, second in the ‘Alms for Oblivion’ series, starts in April 1959 with an old character and a new. Widow Angela Tuck has taken up with a sleazy con man. Mark Lewson, who steals from Angela and then loses her money at the casino, is a loathsome character and she can’t wait to be rid of him. Rippling throughout the novel is the seemingly impossible plan hatched by Angela’s gambler friend to help her. He charges Lewson with buying or stealing a letter that incriminates the British Government in a scandal concerning Suez.
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.
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].
sandra danby 