WRITING to her great friend Evelyn Waugh about her new novel, published in 1945, and contrasting it with his roughly contemporary Brideshead Revisited, Nancy Mitford told him it was: ‘About my family, a very different cup of tea, not grand and far madder.’ And so it was. Where Brideshead is a stately jewel, elegantly phrased, languorous and nostalgic, The Pursuit of Love is tight-packed and intimate, a gossipy, funny, affectionate portrayal of inter-war, upper-crust life.
That was only to be expected. Waugh wrote as the wistful onlooker, the middle-class outsider; Mitford was on the inside as the eldest of the celebrated Mitford Girls, who entertained and scandalised the public in the 1920s and 1930s.
Some insist on reading the book as a social document, which, of course, it is, describing an age on the point of vanishing before its participants’ eyes, but it’s better to enjoy it as a romp, always leaving space for the story’s sad, resigned undertow to surface. There has seldom been a more entertaining cast of characters assembled for our delight than the crazy bunch who gather at the ‘ugly’ Georgian pile of Alconleigh, ‘as bare as a barracks, stuck up on the high hillside’ in the windswept Cotswolds.
This is the home of the Radletts, headed by eccentric Uncle Matthew, based on Mitford’s father, Lord Redesdale; his wife, the vague and gentle Aunt Sadie (their mother); and their unruly offspring, made up of various Mitford composites—Jassy, with her precious running-away money, echoes Jessica Mitford (later the author of Hons and Rebels) who eloped to the Spanish Civil War. The great family friend Lord Merlin was based on the flamboyant aesthete Lord Berners.
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