Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford
by Laura Thompson
My rating 4 out 5 stars
I sought out this biography after reading Laura Thompson's Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. Thompson's work on the famous Mitfords is engaging, entertaining and informative.
Though Nancy was not initially the most famous Mitford (Unity, Diana Mitford Mosley and Jessica Mitford having already attained notoriety with their subversive political antics and men), it was she who later secured the Mitford family myth with her bestselling novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, both (very) loosely based on her family and each still global classics.
As the eldest child of 2nd Baron Redesdale (16 years older than youngest sister Deborah Mitford), she was a prominent socialite long before becoming a famous writer.
Despite her aristocratic, if rather penniless, beginnings, Nancy was the only Mitford sister besides Jessica Mitford, to attain vocational financial independence, the other surviving sisters marrying lucratively regardless of their various individual talents.
Nancy's later books, after the more frivolous fiction that brought her fame, were historical biographies. These were penned during her Paris years - a staunch Francophile, she made that country her home, first in Paris and later in Versailles.
She was also a notorious tease, both to loved ones and the wider world, causing national furore with her tongue-in-cheek commentary on 'U and Non-U' phraseology in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy, which claimed certain terminology defined a person's class. England missed the joke and bit the bait, but Nancy was above it, across the channel in her adopted homeland.
The most socialist of the sisters, the funniest and most stylish, Nancy had a well documented sting in her tail and was perhaps secretly the saddest to reach old age (Unity, who died young, being the most straight forwardly tragic), never settling with a truly devoted husband or partner and long hurt by unrequited adoration for the love of her life, politician Gaston Palewski, the close associate of President Charles de Gaulle.
She suffered a lonely painful death from cancer in 1973, just a year after the French government made her a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur and the British government appointed her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
Whilst much of Laura Thompson's material here is recycled from Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters and much of it generalised Nancy Mitford 'stock' fare from the wide canon of work on her, Thompson's clear fondness for her subject gives it tremendous readability.
I read this book in a just few nights and will no doubt reread it far into the future, Nancy Mitford being one of my all time favourite personalities.
