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.
Denne historien er fra July 21, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent ? Logg på
Denne historien er fra July 21, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
