My review of The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford

The Pursuit of Love

by Nancy Mitford

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

For some years this modern classic was on my 'to read' list, while I was more interested to read about the author. Nancy Mitford, eldest of the famed Mitford sisters, debutante, socialite, committed Francophile and mistress of tease, had a sting in her tail, camouflaged by her droll funniness.

Many have theorised over this, her breakthrough novel of 1945, after her four previous novels had met with little or no critical acclaim. Mitford aficionados have long weighed up what Nancy said about this book's relationship to her infamous family, with what her sisters said and with what endless Mitford biographers have observed or opined.  

That some of the sisters insisted Nancy invented much of their family legend has become misreported over time: Nancy was writing fiction! 

Where this much documented accusation of 'Oh you've made it up, darling' gets distorted is in the sisters' later response to Jessica Mitford's memoir Hons and Rebels, which Nancy and others said 'borrowed' some of Nancy's fictional detail from The Pursuit of Love for the sake of spinning a good yarn.

So, Nancy firmly altered the real Mitford family structure in fictionalising her kin for this novel - presumably in part to avoid libel suites, such was the infamy already surrounding some of the real-life sisters: 

Three of these six sisters were so politically radicalised that one (Diana Mitford Mosley) spent the war years in prison after leaving first husband Bryan Guinness for British fascist movement leader Sir Oswald Mosley (himself in the habit of suing for defamation). Another sister (Jessica Mitford) eloped with the Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Communist nephew Esmond Romilly initially to fight with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, never returning to live in England. A third (Unity Mitford) shot herself in the head after ingratiating herself with Adolph Hitler in the prelude to WWII. 

Mainstream media, including national press and Pathé newsreel, had a field day with them.

By the time Nancy penned this fifth novel, these three sisters' notoriety was set in stone. It's fair to say she used that notoriety in proclaiming The Pursuit of Love as loosely based on her early family life - everyone wanted the juice on this bunch!

But much of the Mitford sisters' real-life controversy was omitted from this novel or juggled around, the resemblances everyone looked for mostly missing. 

Nancy includes fictional Radlett sister Linda leaving husband Tony and going to France with new Communist beau Christian (not a Prime Minister's nephew) to help refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (as did Nancy herself with husband Peter Rodd). 

She has fictional sister 'Jassy' forever stashing her pocket money in a 'Running Away Account' (true for real life sister Jessica Mitford, but this was about as close as it got to the much publicised real life family shenanigans).

So, the novel's similarities to Nancy's kin did not much concern her more infamous three sisters, who had brought the Mitfords into the public eye. What she drew from and elaborated on were things like her parents' eccentricities, quirky household pastimes, the trademark camp Mitfordian lingo, their bizarre pets, and the setting itself, fictionalised as 'Alconleigh' but based on real life Asthall Manor.

This she does deliciously, as agreed by just about everyone on the novel's release. We are there, in Alconliegh, immersed in the bustle of a large minor aristocratic family closely resembling the Mitfords, feeling their love and their growing pains. 

The two heroines, older than the other kids, are eager to escape into adulthood, which will only eventuate by marriage. Hence the title The Pursuit of Love, suggested by Nancy's lifelong friend, sparring partner and sometime literary mentor Evelyn Waugh.   

Once the informed reader accepts this fictionalisation of the Mitfords into the differently structured Radletts, desists digging for disguised public characters and scandals, we are left with the novel itself, as charming as consensus has always deemed. 

However, Nancy Mitford, ever hailed for her wit and humour, was the first to admit she was no serious literary force, at least at this point in her career, her craft developing substantially later. 

There was therefore some anticlimax as I turned the pages, caused by the hype and consequent expectation. Charming and comic as the novel is, it is surprisingly featherweight and not so well penned in patches. 

For example, as primarily autodidactic she had not learned to punctuate, Evelyn Waugh still telling her years later of a manuscript she ran by him: 'The punctuation is pitiable, but it never becomes unintelligible so I just shouldn't try. It is clearly not your subject' (quote from The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh). 

Despite such minor issues I intermittently howled laughing at her characters and dialogue, glowing fuzzily at her heartwarming descriptions of interwar genteel country life.

More recent biographers have said that this was her first 'happy' novel, as in not being meant as a stab at some of her more irritating relatives (definitely so in her preceding four novels). 

The explanation for this was that Nancy, for the first time in her life, was head over heels in love, with the man she would so remain all her life if somewhat unrequitedly, French politician Gaston Palewski. He appears as protagonist Linda's third love interest Fabrice de Sauveterre, a wealthy French duke. 

Nancy even dedicated the novel to Palewski, so much had he loved hearing the tales of her youth. His encouragement and her adoration of him were her incentive to write 'less bitterly'. 

It was with this emotional release, after previously enduring a difficult marriage and before that a fruitless engagement to a gay fiancé, that Nancy wrote minus the stifled anger of her previous works. 

Not quite all 'shrieks' and 'teases', the story does have tragic overtones, providing lightness and darkness, saving it from becoming another of her earlier barbed satirical farces.

Such was its success that Nancy wrote two sequels, Love in a Cold Climate (1949) and Don't Tell Alfred (1960). 

Like many such modern classics, The Pursuit of Love and its immediate sequel Love in a Cold Climate became highly popular screen adaptions, arguably more entertaining than the novels.

As I'll always be a Nancy Mitford fan it's irrelevant how consistently I liked or disliked this one defining piece. The bits I loved outweigh any minor disappointments and I will, without a doubt, read it again.