Nancy Mitford — The Pursuit of Love/Love In a Cold Climate with Laura Thompson

KIM: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes, and Amy, I really don’t think our author today — Nancy Mitford — needs much “dusting off.”  She was a very well-known English novelist from an equally famous socialite family. She and her five sisters were gorgeous and sensational Bright Young Things: The tabloids tracked their every move, and scandal followed them everywhere. And in fact, TV adaptations of Nancy’s famous novels are returning to TV courtesy of Amazon and the BBC -- (the first one has already aired in the UK and we can’t wait to watch it when it airs here.)

AMY: Yes, for true book nerds, Nancy Mitford really doesn’t need any introduction. Yet I’m a little embarrassed to say I didn’t discover her until I was in my 30s when you lent me her books, Kim. It was like this epiphany in my life, you know, that common refrain — “How am I just now discovering her?” So I don’t know that she’s as well-read as she should be — particularly here in America. In fact, whenever I have friends ask me for book recommendations, my first response is: “Have you read Nancy Mitford?” And they almost invariably haven’t, and so I then turn into a raving lunatic trying to convince them that they need to drop everything and go read her. It’s why I’ve desperately wanted to do an episode on her.

KIM: Yes, once you discover Nancy Mitford, it’s like “the thin edge of the wedge,” to quote one of her most unforgettable characters, Uncle Matthew — you just can’t get enough of her. Her semi-autobiographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are outrageously funny, and they’re perceptive social satires of the British upper class. 

AMY: They’re actually part of a trilogy, and there’s just so much comedy packed into these novels  —  really morbid, dark humor at times (which is my favorite kind). But there’s a real poignancy to these coming-of-age stories, too. And once you know more about the life Nancy lived prior to writing them and the real people who inspired her fictional worlds, you get an even greater appreciation for her books.

KIM: And we are “chuffed,” as the Brits say, because joining us today, we’ve got a New York Times bestselling author to help us take an even closer look at Nancy Mitford and the magic of her writing. 

AMY: I’ve been excited for this conversation for the last three months, I can’t wait! So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

INTERVIEW BEGINS

AMY: Our guest today, Laura Thompson, is the author of 2004’s Life in a Cold Climate, which was reissued by Pegasus books in October of last year and was dubbed “the gold standard” of Nancy Mitford biographies by The Wall Street Journal. She also wrote The Six, which tells the story of the Mitford sisters, collectively — that book was a New York Times bestseller in 2016. Among her other works are a biography of Agatha Christie, which was shortlisted for an Edgar Allan Poe award in 2019, and Rex V Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders, which re-examines the famous Thompson-Bywater murder of 1922. (And you might remember that we briefly talked about that case in our episode on E.M. Delafield last year. I am reading Laura’s book on that case right now and I’m flat-out obsessed with it. So definitely recommend that.) Thompson also published The Last Landlady, a critically-acclaimed 2018 memoir about her grandmother, who was the first woman in England granted a license to run a pub. And wow, if we had a few days, I would totally talk to her on all these subjects and then some, but for now, we’ll stick to Nancy Mitford. Laura Thompson, welcome to our show!

LAURA: How lovely of you to have me. I’m thrilled. Thank you.

KIM: Laura, I think when you meet a fellow Nancy Mitford fan, you can instantly say to yourself, “Okay, on some level this person and I are going to ‘get’ each other.” When did you first discover her and what made you compelled to write about her and her family?

LAURA: For me, it was The Pursuit of Love. It's the obvious entry point in a way, and I read the book when I think I was about 14. And up to that point, I was quite, you know, puritanical about literature in some ways. You know, I sort of thought it had to be Thomas Hardy, or George Eliot; you had to be quite miserable about the whole thing. You know, I'd never read a novel up to that point that I knew was good, you know, but was so pleasurable, and so much fun, and so light on the page. Nancy Mitford makes lightness into a thing of absolute value. It's not superficiality, this lightness. It’s something glorious. And this book, as we know, is fairly heavily autobiographical — obviously we'll talk about all that. But that got me into the sisters. Later on, I just had this yearning to write about Nancy Mitford. And oddly enough, when I got the idea, which was 2002, her reputation in this country was, you know ... we're obsessed with class, you know that. And there was a slight sort of, “Oh, she's a silly posh woman who writes silly posh books, and you know, they’re jolly good fun, but they're just silly and posh.” (As if posh people aren't entirely human.) And I really wanted to challenge this view and to sort of talk about her as a real writer with an authorial voice like no other which enchants, in my view, more than any other. I was lucky enough to meet the two surviving Mitford girls, which was Diana (Wow, one of the most memorable afternoons of my life!) and Deborah, who was also fantastic. And so it kind of went from there. And then later on, I was asked to write the group biography, which I thought, “God, there's nothing more to say about them.” But they're kind of was, because it's kind of like: Why are we still so interested in them, when they represent so much that we hold rather the opposite of dear, like being upper class, being privileged, being all those kinds of things that we're supposed to not really care for anymore? Yet, they still fascinate. So there we go. And the Mitfords … you know, a whole new generation of younger women are now fascinated by the Mitfords. It's extraordinary.

AMY: Absolutely. And once you get a little touch of it, you can't help but become obsessed with the whole family.

LAURA: See, this is what I really wanted, if you don't mind me asking a question... I mean, obviously, my book The Six did really well in America, and praise God for that. But they’re so English. I'm so interested as to how Nancy’s writing — The Pursuit of Love, which is an image of England that doesn't really exist anymore — how it strikes an American reader when it must be so alien or what?

AMY: Well, first of all, we have this fantasy, right, of the aristocracy. But then when you learn about them, they are so real. They're so like, if you come from a big family, that's how you and your siblings are. I was saying to Kim before you jumped on the podcast, there like an English version, almost of if you know, David and Amy Sedaris…

LAURA: Oh, god, that’s… YES!

AMY: The madcap-ness of their family. Not only is it hysterical, but it also makes them relatable. Suddenly, they're not up on a higher stratosphere than the rest of us. Anyway, Nancy’s breakout novel, The Pursuit of Love, tells the story of Linda Radlett, her colorful, aristocratic family and her meandering quest to find true love. It was published in 1945 at a time when readers were sick of all the deprivation of WWII. People wanted to read about luxury and privilege, and they were desperate to laugh. (I think that also factors into, you know, why it’s still appealing, to this day.) Mitford’s book proved the answer to that collective need and cemented her career as a writer. So the story is told through the point of view of the Radletts’ cousin, Fanny, who spends a great deal of time at Alconleigh, the estate of her “Uncle Matthew” and “Aunt Sadie” (who, in real life would be Nancy’s parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale). The book, which covers the span of about 15 years, is semi-autobiographical, as Laura said, and so Linda is representative of Nancy, herself, while other characters in the Radlett family are nods to the rest of the Mitford clan. Largely left to their own devices in this huge, ancient house, the children sort of run unchecked to do and say the most wildly hilarious things. 

KIM: Right, and like the real-life Mitford children, the Radlett kids in the book seem borderline feral — especially the girls, because their father (as in real life) refuses to educate them beyond a finishing school in most cases, though he does send their brother to Eton. So they categorize people as “Hons,” or “Counter-Hons” (Trust us, you want to be a “Hon.”) The kids occasionally hole up in the “Hon’s cupboard” (it’s a linen cupboard) where they attempt to decipher grown-up gossip or figure out the mysteries of sex. It’s really funny.

AMY: Yeah, and at one point when one of the youngest girls can’t get any official answers on the topic, one of them declares, “Very well then, we shall go to our marriage beds in ignorance, like Victorian ladies, and in the morning we shall be found stark, staring mad with horror and live sixty more years in an expensive bin, and then perhaps you’ll wish you had been more helpful.” They are all so funny, and they have all sorts of hilarious inside jokes — the siblings love tormenting one another (and their parents) and it seems like their mission in life is to see just how inappropriate or obnoxious they can be without actually getting in trouble. This is made extra comical by the fact that their father (Fanny’s Uncle Matthew) is both a terrifying tyrant and yet seemingly toothless in carrying out any of his threats. (His bark is far greater than his bite, and he’s arguably the most entertaining character in the book, in my opinion. If I could bring any literary character to life and spend the day with them, it would be Uncle Matthew, without a doubt. I have a weird affection for grumpy older men.) 

LAURA: Yeah. No, same here!

KIM: I think you could take him on.

AMY: I think I could. Yeah, I would be interested to see if I got his seal of approval. Anyway, this curmudgeonly patriarch plus a gaggle of intractable teenage daughters equals comedy gold.

KIM: Yeah, Meanwhile, their mother, Sadie (the kids disrespectfully call her by her first name), seems a bit “out to lunch” in the midst of her exasperating brood. If you grew up in a household with siblings, you will identify with Mitford’s realistic portrayal of the kids’ perpetual shenanigans.

AMY: And Laura, I’m wondering if you would care to read us, maybe, one of your favorite passages from The Pursuit of Love to give our listeners an idea of the kind of humor we’re describing?

LAURA: Sure, well, this is just a short passage just from the beginning to give a sense of the relationship with Uncle Matthew and how they all carried on. So they live in the Cotswolds (so in the heart of England) on his land, basically, of which he had a great deal, and Fanny, who gets to visit them (who comes from a much more conventional upbringing — she goes to school and is not posh/feral in the same way) but you know, they are portrayed as more glamorous, more enticing, etc, etc. and more, in a way, sharper. So Fanny turns up and the eldest child, Louisa says, “‘Child hunt tomorrow, Fanny.’ My Uncle Matthew had four magnificent bloodhounds, with which he used to hunt his children. Two of us would go off with a good start to lay the trail, and Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow the hounds on horseback. It was great fun. Once he came to my home and hunted Linda and me over Shenley Common. This caused the most tremendous stir locally, the Kentish week-enders on their way to church were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after two little girls. My uncle seemed to them like a wicked lord of fiction, and I became more than ever surrounded with an aura of madness, badness, and dangerousness for their children to know.”

This idea of the child hunt … when you read that for the first time, it's sort of like... you know, I grew up in the country, but the idea of hunting children with bloodhounds? It's portrayed as completely the norm. There's no, “Wow, it's unbelievable. This man's hunting his children.” You get this overview from Fanny, whose upbringing is more conventional. But really, you're in the world of the Radletts. You so rightly said that Uncle Matthew … he is like an ogre. But at the same time, he's kind of powerless in the face of their personalities, really. And that was pretty much as it was in real life. What I love about Uncle Matthew (and I think, Amy, you would probably have got on with him pretty well), because although he rants and raves, and all the rest of it, there's a vulnerability about him. And there's this dependence on his wife Sadie, who's in a way, the real head of the household. You also feel his dependence upon her, which in real life was true with Lord Redesdale; how uneasy he became away from home, how uneasy he became away from his wife. Here, it's done for comedic value. The sense that although he's (as Fanny says) “The wicked lord of fiction,” there is a vulnerability inside him. And that's what I think makes him such a brilliant character, really. He's not purely a caricature. The same as Lady Montdore in Love in a Cold Climate, who's his kind of female counterpart. She's an ogress, but she's also vulnerable. Nancy does that so brilliantly.

KIM: Yeah, the self awareness that Nancy has as she's explaining all this, that it's insane and dark, but that she finds it humorous, and if you have a sense of humor, you're going to get that and come along with her ride, basically. I love that self-awareness of her about the perception of the outside world. And then I was going to say, in relation to what you were saying about Uncle Matthew, I think another passage, the one about Linda attempting suicide over the Border Terrier, and basically, there's all this punishment, but then she ends up with a new Labrador puppy. So I think it shows us that there are conflicting sides of Uncle Matthew, like, he can be like this harsh punisher to them, but they also know that he has this soft side for the people he loves and this soft side for animals.

LAURA: Absolutely. But the Britishness of the countryside is not shirked. The memories that pour forth in this book of Nancy's (which she wrote in three months -- that's how ready it was to come out). And she writes about, you know, you hear the branding of the lambs and you hear the fox going off with a hen; all the realities of the countryside are a kind of undercurrent of the book all the way through. And her descriptions of the countryside, which are really, really ... she talks about a ‘moleskin sky,’which is exactly what it does look like at certain times of year. It's so direct; she's got this wonderful, childlike directness of description. Nothing is shirked. I mean, where they grew up, the house that I think outwardly, in a sense, is meant to be [Alconleigh], which is Asthall house, which is not far from Oxford. It's next to the church, and their bedrooms overlooked a graveyard. And I think that motif permeates The Pursuit of Love. You know, it's the most joyful book you'll ever read, and all the time there’s this drag of melancholy. And that is what makes it a masterpiece, in my view.

KIM: And that’s a great segue to, how would you characterize Mitford’s brand of humor? And can you talk a bit about why humor was so vital to her? It seems like joking and sarcasm was how she navigated life — maybe it was even her defense mechanism against some of the things you’re talking about.

LAURA: Yes, you know, it's so hard to imagine that upbringing. These six girls. So Nancy was born in 1904, and the youngest, Deborah, was born in 1921 (The maid said, “I knew it was a girl by the look on his lordship’s face,” because he’d got you know, six girls and only one son, Tom. The son is a very important character in the family — not spoken about enough, I don't think. I think he was hugely influential, Tom, within the family.) So they grow up, and only Tom goes to school. He's coach for Eaton, which meant that the sisters closest in age to him, which were Nancy, Diana, and Pam, (who's a little bit the odd one out, but nevertheless), they kind of got the overflow of his education in a way. And Nancy and Diana both grew up to be extremely intelligent. I mean, Diana was trilingual, Nancy was completely bilingual. By anybody's standards, they're extremely clever, well-read women. But I think growing up and never really going anywhere... And in one sense, they were completely free, completely wild — could do whatever they liked, as in the book, and in another way they were completely circumscribed. You know, they had a London house, but they couldn’t cross the road without a chaperone. They never met anyone who wasn't part of their very, very tight circle, or, a game keeper or groom or whatever. So a life completely free and completely confined. There's a slight air in the book of the fairytale, you know? The Rapunzels in their tower waiting to be liberated, as Linda longs to be. But I think the boredom of that upbringing, which to a girl of Nancy's intelligence was phenomenal. Of course, it was incredibly productive, as I think boredom can be when you’re a child. Her frustration took the form at an early stage of humor, what you might call a spiteful humor, and the butt of it was usually Pam. Pam was a bit mild and meek, and Nancy would play these terrible tricks on her. (She dressed up as a tramp and pretended to rape her!) And so humor became her way of deflecting boredom, deflecting jealousy, deflecting frustration, and then it became a kind of Mitford... It kind of defines the Mitfords, and in a way is their “get out of jail” card for the many very terrible political choices that they made in the 1930s, of which we're all aware: Communism, Fascism, Naziism. For some reason, we still sort of are fascinated by them, and almost, in a way, love them. And it's partly English charm, which is, you know, a bit devilish — it seduces, but it's really that they're so funny. They have this lightness, they have this humor with which they, you know … Diana was sent to jail in the war. She managed to make these incredibly funny jokes about it. And Nancy, when Nancy was dying of cancer, she made incredibly funny jokes about it. You can say they all were, you know, in our sort of therapised culture, they're probably, you know, terribly repressed and terribly strained. It worked for them. It worked for them, and it's part of what makes them so seductive.

AMY: Yeah, it's very much “gallows humor,” and it's reminding me of in the book when the Radlett children are hoping that their parents’ ship would go down so that they could be orphans. That goes back to your idea of “they're just bored.” Fanny has a mother who they call the Bolter who just goes from one relationship to the next — one marriage to the next — and the Radlett children say to Fanny “what we wouldn't give to have a wicked mother like yours!” basically.

LAURA: Yeah. The Bolter is hilarious. I love the way they just call her the Bolter. Like “Mary.” Oh, hello, Bolter! Yes, absolutely brilliant. But yes, I mean, Nancy, when she was living in Paris, a friend of hers said, “Lord, you always say we're roaring with laughter. You’d say we were roaring laughter if we were on the way to the guillotine.” She said, “Well, you probably would be!”

AMY: You describe the Mitford family in your book as an “impregnable unit of rampant individualism,” which I loved. That’s totally accurate. They antagonized one another all through their lives, but they also really loved each other deep down. And looking back, it’s easy to use shorthand descriptions for each member of the family. We have Nancy — she’s the oldest one who was the “joker” and the Francophilic novelist. There was Pam, the “rural one,” that kind of meek good girl. Then there’s Diana, the “beautiful Fascist,” Unity, the “Nazi headcase,” Decca, the “spitfire and rebel,” and Deborah the sensible youngest. So on top of that, they were all drop-dead gorgeous. I could (and admittedly have) spent hours Googling old photos of them. And I want to say, if I could age the way Diana aged, that’s my only ask in life. She was gorgeous, up to the very end.

LAURA: It's true. It's true. When I met her, she was about 90. She turned, and I thought, “Oh, my God!” This pure cheekbone, and very tall. She had ballerina grace. Oh, my goodness, extraordinary!

KIM: What was that like, spending the afternoon with her? Tell us about it.

LAURA: Amazing. I mean, it's something I've never ... I think about her so much. I was terrified. I was really frightened of meeting her — I really was. She lived in this beautiful flat in Paris, in the Seventh Arrondissement. Absolutely lovely: beautiful, white, airy. And I was terrified. I thought, “This is the woman who knew Hitler, who got married in Goebbels’s house!” And the charm of her... the warmth of her. I just sat there the whole time thinking, “You are the most delightful person I've ever met in my life! You are so funny, and so charming and so intelligent. And you were a Fascist.” And you're just sitting there the whole time trying to, you know ... this conundrum. And the unrepentant nature of her is almost what I admired the most. You know, she wrote to Deborah later in life. She said, “Look, I cannot pretend it was anything other than interesting to know Hitler. I refuse to pretend that it wasn't interesting.” Of course, she didn't endorse the Final Solution, or any of that; Anybody who says she did, that's not true. But nevertheless, you know, it's a hell of a thing. You know, I can imagine people thinking, why am I even saying that I enjoyed her company? But I did. She's the most enigmatic woman of the 20th century, I really think that, but I'm very glad I met her. Very, very glad I met her. What an experience, my goodness, amazing.

KIM: We really recommend that you read Laura's book, The Six, to get everyone's stories. It is so good. I'm actually in the middle of reading that one right now, and I love it. Laura, given that the family members were already quite well known in society, how did the sisters feel about being so obviously depicted in Nancy's book? And how did the rest of the family feel?

LAURA: Yeah, that's a very interesting question, I think, because I think in a way, The Pursuit of Love saved them. Because in December 1945, when the book came out, and as you said, was an instant success. (She made so much money from it.) And up till that point, she'd been quite poor, and her mother, with whom she had quite a fraught relationship (Sydney Redesdale is a slightly different kind of woman from Aunt Sadie, in The Pursuit of Love. There's a coldness in Sydney Redesdale). And she wrote to Jessica, she said, “Oh, this family again,” meaning Nancy's book, and you sort of think, “Hang on, hang on, Love. ‘This family, again,’ is what's going to save your reputation.” Because in December 1945, you've got Unity, who was close to Hitler and shot herself on the day that war was declared (but didn't die, the bullet lodged in her brain.) You've got Diana, who was imprisoned as a Fascist sympathizer. You've got Jessica, who eloped with her Communist cousin and was a member of the Communist Party... With The Pursuit of Love she expunges the darkness in the Mitfords which is very, very powerful in the midst of all this scintillating champagne, bubbly stuff, and she, you know... nobody likes Hitler in the book. It's a gift! It’s a gift to them. Lord Redesdale, who in real life had met Hitler at Nuremberg and then had been forced to write a sort of mea culpa letter to The Times newspaper saying, “I'm so sorry I ever endorsed this man. I loathe Hitler. I loathe Nazis,” and all this kind of thing, but nevertheless, for the rest of his life he was regarded as a German sympathizer. In the book, Uncle Matthew, he hates Nazis! He is the ultimate anti-Nazi. He is this wonderful man of, you know, vigor. And well, Lord Redesdale was no longer those things. And his marriage to Sydney Redesdale was over. And so this book, which recreates something that, in a major sense, was disappearing, but it makes Nancy the gatekeeper to this Mitford mythology. And then you find out the reality, and that's even more interesting. So but you always have that duality. And if they resented it, the family, I think they were very ungrateful because, I think it did, yeah — it sort of saved them, really.

AMY: The tabloids were following this family. The press couldn't get enough of them. So to be able to sort of reposition their story a little bit through these books, at a time when they were starting to be vilified was probably important, and she was turning it into a fairy tale of sorts. And as we mentioned, Alconleigh is the home of the Radlett family in Mitford’s fiction, but in real life, the family lived in a number of different homes throughout the years. You kind of mentioned this a little already, but which of their homes would have been the inspiration for “Alconleigh?” And then also, we think of them as swimming in money, but were they, actually?

LAURA: Yeah, exactly. That's another big difference between the book, and this image of the English country house is powerful. There's something immutable about it. And that's what she makes Alconleigh, really. There is a kind of fable-like aspect about the English countryside. The house the family... there is a fable-like aspect to it in real life. They were quite peripatetic. When Nancy was born… so, her father only inherited the title by default because his older brother was killed in the first World War. So in 1916, he became Lord Redesdale and inherited this huge castle in Gloucestershire (Batsford), which is just extraordinary. But he was just the world's worst with money. He just could not hold on to anything. All this sense, again, of the immutability of Uncle Matthew’s land, that too had kind of gone by the time the book was written. So they went from Batsford to Asthall, which is a lovely house, and that's where they were happiest, I think. And I think it's the atmosphere of that house that she's describing in The Pursuit of Love. But physically, it's a house called Swinbrook. It's quite an ugly house, and it did have the Hons’ Cupboard because it was the only place you could get warm. But no, when Nancy said, “I wrote my first book because I wanted to earn 100 pounds,” that's kind of true. She didn't have any money. He had no money to give them as members of the upper classes usually did, you know, like a dowry or anything. It's extraordinary the way the reality diverges from The Pursuit of Love.

KIM: So like Linda Radlett in The Pursuit of Love, as a young adult Nancy Mitford has her own series of disappointing love affairs in her search for the one true love of her life. Her first serious romantic contender, Hamish St.-Clair, was gay, but he managed to string out an engagement to Nancy for years before he finally ended things. It’s crazy to me that she had no idea! (or did she?)

LAURA: Well, he’d had an affair with her brother, so I mean … that’s a big clue. But, you know, when I said about it to Deborah, she got a bit cross. She said, “No, no, no, you can't imagine. Girls were so innocent. She wouldn't have known he was gay. No.” But that can't be, I don't think, because Tom Mitford’s friends, many of them were gay, or bisexual; these wonderful, witty amusing men who absolutely adored Nancy. But I always feel with Nancy that she did have this almost gift (or anti-gift) for picking the wrong men, to such an extent that I felt a bit that she didn't really want that conventional.... I mean, she was extremely attractive. She had a couple of sort of “proper types” after her and everything. And instead of going off to dinner with one of them, she'd sit in a nightclub with  Hamish and wait for Tom to come and bail them out with a fiver or something. I mean, why did she do that? Because she didn't want the other thing? I don't know. That's my instinct, anyway.

AMY: She was clearly humiliated about being dumped by Hamish, which led her to save-face in a most unfortunate way, I think. So shortly after things went belly-up with Hamish, she married a man named Peter Rodd. (Unlike Linda, her counterpart in The Pursuit of Love, Nancy was practically an old maid at the ripe old age of 29 when this happened. So Peter proposed to her one night as a joke at a party and she sort of desperately jumped at it.) It wasn’t just a rebound, it was a total disaster, and reading about their marriage in your book, Laura, I just wanted to yell, “What are you doing? Don’t do this! It’s obviously not going to work!”

LAURA: Yeah, I'm glad you had that reaction, because ... he was very-good looking. He was very intelligent. You know, he was a Balliol scholar. He was a friend of Evelyn Waugh. He was good on paper, as they say. But he was a mystery really, Peter Rodd, because he had everything. And he also had a good wife! (She tried to be a good wife.) I think it meant, I know the convention was to be married. And I think the trouble was, unless she was married, she couldn't really get away from home properly. She couldn't really live a life. I think she did go into it with genuine hopes, which were quashed pretty quickly when he started having an affair. I mean, it was no time at all — a year, two years, something like that. (He also had an affair with one of her cousins.) You know, she made a bit of money out of her writing — she also did journalism —and he would steal it out of her purse. But in a way I always thought she did quite like him, actually. I think she felt guilty. She had quite a lot of old-fashioned morality, Nancy. For all her sort of anarchic humor, in some ways she was the most conventional Mitford. I think she really minded the marriage breaking down. Diana said “he was a terrible bore.” And that, of course, comes out in Tony Kroesig in The Pursuit of Love, who is Linda’s first husband, who is the most boring man in London. And Peter was like that; he sort of knew everything about a subject, and then told you. All of it. I think she tried. I think she really wanted it to work, but he was impossible. He was a bit of a wild man really.

KIM: As her younger sisters started marrying and having children, Nancy was trapped in a loveless marriage to this philandering, deadbeat husband. She suffered several miscarriages and she later had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy which would leave her childless. Laura, this is really sad, but could you say this ended up being a turning point for her in terms of the direction her life took from here on out?

LAURA: Yes, I think that's right. The final miscarriage — it was an ectopic pregnancy that led to the operation — that was from an affair of her own. You know, he'd had God knows how many, and he was really angry that she had this one affair with, when the Free French were based in London, she had an affair with one of the Free French officers. And that was what led to this, in one sense, calamity. It's so hard to know what she really felt about it, because the facade with Nancy is so bright and so strong. And yet one does get these glimpses of vulnerability, particularly in her letters to Evelyn Waugh. She’ll suddenly say something like, “Oh, don't tease me about not having children.” And then in another letter, she'll say, “Oh, my god, they're the worst. How do you stand them blah-blah-blah?” So there is this ambivalence, which is completely understandable. But it did mean that, having tried the conventional life, and having been a writer of four novels (the first one, when she was 25, which is remarkable. A couple of comic, Bright Young Thing-type novels, then they start to get better. Wigs on the Green, a satire on Oswald Mosley and the Fascists. And then Pigeon Pie, which I love. I'm going to shout out for Pigeon Pie.) After the hysterectomy, after the war, effectively ended the marriage to Peter (“Prod,” as she called him), yes, she was liberated, to be ... (cliche, sorry) the person she really should be. You know, free. An artist. Independent. Fantastic. And she began the famous affair with Gaston Palewski, who was DeGaulle’s right-hand man. She met him in 1942, again, in London, Free French, you know. She was going to the club there and she spoke very good French, and she was extremely smart and charming and attractive. She just fell for him. Bowled over, like Linda is in The Pursuit of Love when she meets her Frenchman Fabrice de Sauveterre. Gaston Palewski was not a French duke, but he was a ladies man in a good sense… in a bad sense, in that he was incapable of fidelity, but in a good sense in that he could talk to her as a woman. He could appreciate her as a woman, as none of her Englishmen had ever done. She, through him, in some obscure way, was liberated to write The Pursuit of Love, because she told him stories about her family. And he would say, “Oh, this is wonderful. This is so fascinating. This is rapturous,” and that sort of liberated her to think, “Yes, that's what I should write.” The simplicity of it. The need for plot just kind of fell away and she just wrote in her own voice, her own story. It just flowed out of her. In a sense, Palewski is the muse for that book. And then of course, she had enough money to move to Paris. And to write this ... god I mean, Love in a Cold Climate. You've mentioned it, I mean, it's just fantastic. And even funnier than The Pursuit of Love I think.

AMY: She settled in Paris, as you said. She absolutely loved it there. But how much of that do you think had to do with being in love with Gaston Palewski, and how much of it was a love affair with the city itself? Why did Paris appeal to this woman we consider so thoroughly British?

LAURA: Yeah, yeah. It's such a good question, because I think he and Paris are so bound up together, you know? There is this view, which I find a bit irksome, that, “Oh, she went hot-footing to Paris to be with Gaston. Oh, little woman, you know, and he didn't really want her. But she went to Paris to be near him so that he could ring her up and ask her to dinner if he hadn’t got anyone else to see.” And it's all a bit pathetic. God, that makes me angry. As if a woman like that ... yes, she was in love with him, but she had the most fantastic life! And she had a lot of friends out there. You know, there's something about the ambience of Paris that is romantic in a profound sense, and the formal, sexy sort of life there. And it's just, I don't think she'd ever been really happy in England. I think in a way she was (sorry, it's a bit of another cliché) I think she was always too intelligent for most of the men she knew. I think they couldn't cope with her. She was too bright and sharp, and, you know, a bit too much for them. And her family was disintegrating, and it was all a bit sad. And I think she just wanted to escape. From the age of 40, really, she was reborn. She was reborn. It is very intoxicating, Paris. And of course, he was there. And of course, that was fantastic. And of course, her sisters were so crazy about Germany, it was another way of saying, you know, there are other choices.

KIM: Let’s talk a little bit about the war itself for a moment. You had mentioned about the family members being Fascist, several of them. Unity and Nancy’s own mother were pal-ing around with Hitler — sister Jessica ran away and married a Communist. How did Nancy’s political leanings compare to the rest?

LAURA: Well, Nancy and Jessica were the only two who didn't meet Hitler, in fact. Even lovely, sane Deborah had tea with him. And when I wrote The Six, what I really tried to do was try to describe it as it was at the time. For example, when Diana fell in love with Oswald Mosley, he wasn't the monster. It was 1932 and he was regarded as the kind of future of British politics. Not because he was a fascist, but because he was, you know, a new man with new ideas. And, you know, it's the progression of things through the ’30s and how Diana's influence made Unity kind of fascinated by Fascism. And then she wanted to go one better. “She’s got Mosley, I've got Hitler.”  They’re really young girls, and there is an element of …  Unity writes about Hitler as if he were Harry Styles! I know that sounds really sort of inappropriate, but there’s something in it. And then Jessica goes the other way, goes to the left, the Communist thing. Nancy, meanwhile, her politics were pretty, what we would call today pretty centrist, really. I mean, she says in an interview, “Well, I've always been sort of a vague socialist.” You know, she voted Labour in 1945, so she sort of voted for the end of her own kind, really. She was always sort of center-left really but pretty centrist, as was Deborah. (Although center-right.) They had an overview on what the others were getting up to, really, and wanted to stay well out of it. That's what one feels really.

KIM: The only son in the family, Tom, was killed in the war — he was fighting in the Pacific Theater — so a lot of tragedy was befalling the family just as Nancy’s star was really starting to rise. We won’t give away any spoilers, but there’s a wretchedness to both The Pursuit of Love as well as Love in a Cold Climate even in the midst of so much humor. 

AMY: Yes, and the visual you get from her first few lines in The Pursuit of Love really highlights that contrast, I think. She writes in her opening: “There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece, plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children.” So the entrenching tool is obviously meant to be laughed at in this book, but there’s a lot of “death” running throughout the whole story. And she manages to co-mingle the glittering and the grim throughout the book. Her heroines do awful things at times and you still can’t help but love them. So Laura, you note in your book that Nancy Mitford is not really a satirist, even though she’s often described as one. Can you explain what you mean by that? And what do you think she was ultimately trying to do with these novels? 

LAURA: I mean, yes, some people do call her a satirist. Perhaps I don't know entirely what that means, but I don't see her that way, no. Her adult voice is one of smiling benevolence, you know, and remarkably free of judgment. And in Love in a Cold Climate, it's having your cake and eating it. Some of the people in it are quite reprehensible the way they behave. But there's no judgment. That's just what people are like. She said to Evelyn Waugh, “The god I love likes people to be happy.” That's really how she sort of presents her characters. Even though The Pursuit of Love has a tremendous amount of sadness, it's a more poetic book, I think. It's a kind of, almost like a poetic outpouring. I think that beginning you described, which instantly gives you a sense of perspective on the whole thing about the family photographs. There's a sense of the immutable in the book, but there's also a sense of change rushing away and bringing with it potential tragedy. There's always that pull in The Pursuit of Love that gives it a sense of tremendous vital joy, but also a sense of almost dread, I think. But I don't know how much awareness she had of that. You feel it's instinctive, this mastery she's got of what she's doing, what she was trying to do. I mean, Evelyn Waugh, when somebody asked him, what are you trying to do with your novels? He said, “Well, I'm just trying to write good novels.” And I think that might be her answer. She wants to entertain. She wants to amuse. She wants to earn money. The artistry, which I think is very present in her, I think was not something that she, herself, gave a huge amount of consideration to. I'm saying that. I don't know. I don't know.

AMY: If I was wanting to highlight in my book all the lines that made me laugh, my book would be completely yellow, right? It's that rife with humor. And then it's also just so dark. It's just, it's really special and unique in that way, I think, as is Love in a Cold Climate. I guess it’s sort of like a companion novel. We have a lot of the same characters. We have narrator, Fanny, again — but this time she’s recounting the romantic travails of another friend Polly Montdore, who is a young debutante who could have any of the finest young men in England but she has  no interest in any of them. She’s the coldest in the “cold climate” you could say.

KIM: Absolutely, and that’s much to the dismay of her obnoxious and overbearing mother, Lady Montdore, who is every bit as comical as the Radlett family’s Uncle Matthew. (And the Radletts do factor into this novel, too, by the way, which is great). But Polly ends up making an unexpected and utterly scandalous love match which throws everyone into a tizzy.

AMY: And it seems as though the fractured Montdore family will never get over the shock of Polly’s marriage until a distant relative named Cedric buzzes onto the scene (And I mean that literally -- Mitford describes him as a “human dragonfly”) He shakes up the family more than Polly’s marriage ever could.

KIM: He's almost like the “jump the shark” adopted child in a sitcom, only it's much better. He's so great, though. And he’s sort of this lovable “gay life coach” and Lady Montdore becomes his willing project. They all get caught up in that and sort of stop worrying about the Polly situation. Laura, do you have any favorite “Cedric” moments?

LAURA: What always kills me, and I always  think about it, because as you say, Lady Montdore who's so funny. She absolutely is so funny. And the fact that Polly, who is the most beautiful girl in London and she can't marry her off ... her frustration and rage about the whole thing. And then when Cedric comes along, who is this beautiful, highly groomed young man, he sort of takes her in her hand and makes her obsessed with her own appearance. So she loses tons of weight. She has a facelift. She has her hair done and all this kind of thing. And he says to her, I want to make her smile in a photograph, so how you learn to smile is you say the word “brush.” I think it’s hilarious, that “brush!” He is so fey and gorgeous. And it is just a delight.

AMY: He is just the fabulous gay friend that everybody wants. The “brush…” I do want to try that. It reminds me, I feel like I had a gay friend that told me whenever you're going to have your picture taken, to open your mouth when you're smiling, like, [Aaah]. You look better that way, when you have your mouth open for your smile — so it totally reminded me of that. And it’s so sweet the way he’s ultimately accepted by everyone. Yes, people are shocked by his fashion and the things he says. But it just made me think… the fact that Nancy had written this character (a gay character) in her book, was it daring at all, for her to have done that in that time period? 

LAURA: Yes. I mean, Harold Acton (who was gay) said in his biography of Nancy, he said quite seriously, that her completely nonjudgmental, not even mentioning in any way of, you know, that it's anything out of the ordinary, this description of Cedric helped make homosexuality more acceptable in this country, certainly. It wasn't legalized here until 1967, which is sort of incredible, especially when you think that in Nancy's circle, everybody was gay, everybody was bisexual. And that's the way Nancy, again in that wonderfully as I say, childlike sophistication of hers, just puts down things as they are. And because he's just there, Cedric. And he does misbehave in it. You know, he really does, actually. But they're all sophisticates. They're all people of the world. And I think Harold Acton, if he said that, then he should know what he was talking about. Putting Cedric in a book like that did have an effect, a sort of societal effect. It's hard to know whether it did shock some people in 1948 or 1949. It may have done, but my goodness, the book was another raging success.

AMY: And speaking of shocking people, let's talk about the Lecherous Lecturer, which is the nickname that the Radlett girls have for Boy Dougdale because of his unwanted advances toward them when they were younger. It seems like nothing is sacred when it comes to the targets of Nancy's humor. I mean, we see how in The Pursuit of Love, Linda treats her own daughter, Moira. You are a little taken aback. Do you think, Laura, that she is an acquired taste for some people because of that? And do you think her novels can stand the test of time, given how sardonic they are in a lot of ways?

LAURA: I mean, yes. Some of the things she writes, you think, “How has she not gotten canceled?” You know, when Fanny goes to see Linda's baby, and she says, “Oh, well, she's over there. It's kinder not to look” —  she really just has no feelings at all for her baby. And in one way, it's funny in the kind of [gasp] you know. Some of the lines, if you read them in cold blood, as it were, I mean, Boy Dougdale, who is the Lecherous Lecturer [laughing] …. You see, to me, it's funny. I don't know, I can imagine some people… she's not going to pass the “Ten Commandments of Woke-ery.” I don't know. It's like the Mitfords themselves. It's like what we were talking about before. She kind of gets away with things, with this same tone of smiling politeness that, in a way, characterizes the Mitfords. That tension within the Mitfords of formality and anarchy. So she gets away with stuff. But yeah, I can imagine that there will be people who will think “What the hell?”

AMY: Yeah, I think it goes back to what Kim had said earlier, which is when you run across another person that loves Nancy Mitford, you're almost in a club. You either get it and you think it's hilarious, or if you're going to be offended, then you're not in our circle, you know?

LAURA: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If you’re offended by them, you know, read something else. It’s not a big deal. 

KIM: In the 1950s, Mitford pivoted to writing historical biographies, which were highly regarded, I think? Can you tell us a little about them, and are they worth reading?

LAURA: Oh, yes, I think so. Particularly the first one, which is a biography of Madame de Pompadour. She writes in the same style as she writes a novel. So again, we've got the wonderful directness, we've got the wonderful cleaving to the heart of motive. She's got this wonderful ability to get to the heart of the matter and tell you what you need to know. Nonfiction can be quite unreadable, sometimes, but not with her. She never wrote anything that was anything other than entertaining.

KIM: In the end, Nancy’s own “pursuit of love” proved unfruitful. She finally divorced Peter Rodd in 1957 after living apart for years. Gaston Palewski moved to Rome and fathered a child with a different mistress. She moved from Paris to a house in Versailles in 1967 just to escape all of her reminders of him in Paris. She grew sick and close to death soon after finding out from him that he was going to marry another woman. Physically, she went progressively downhill from there. There’s an inclination to feel sad about her overall life trajectory, but do you think that’s misguided?

LAURA: You know, it's so interesting the way you've put that, Kim, because it's right what you've just said. But in another way, I think one can interpret it differently. I think from 1957, when he was made the French ambassador in Rome, I think her life did start to dim from that point. So she was in her 50s (which then would have been older than now, of course), and she'd had a very lovely life in Paris, you know, friends, social success, beautiful clothes, lovely apartment, blah, blah, blah. And then I think the realities made themselves apparent. I know her sisters, I mean, both of them said to me, (Diana and Deborah), that she had a very sad life. And it was very sad that she didn't have children. That's their interpretation. That's not my personal opinion. And I'm not sure it was Nancy's really. I think she did love him very much, Palewski. You know, when he got married to somebody else, I think it was terrible for her. But I think she knew by that time that he's not Fabrice in the book. He's not going to return to her and say, “I've come to tell you, I love you.” But in a weird way, what she wrote is as real to her as what she lived. I think she did have a terrible time when she got ill because they couldn't diagnose this cancer. And the pain was, it’s heartbreaking. I'm sort of welling up just thinking about it now, actually. It's not a conventionally happy life, but I think there was a lot of happiness in it for her. I feel the joy coming off her that makes me feel, “God she got pleasure out of life.”

KIM: You wrote in your biography of Nancy a really beautiful summary, I think, of The Pursuit of Love. You remark that the book is, “suffused to its considerable depths with feeling: bright with hope, shadowed with sadness, sometimes cold and stony with realism…. Steeped in a homespun, benevolent understanding of human nature, which shows as clear and clean beneath the sparkle as dolphins moving steadily under a sunlit sea.” That’s so perfect, Laura, and I think it really also beautifully sums up Nancy’s own pursuit of happiness in life. 

LAURA: Thank you, Kim. Gosh, that's so nice to hear. You know, I really loved writing that book. I really got very, you know, engaged with Nancy. And I think I found her pursuit of happiness, which as we've said, can be interpreted in different ways. She can be interpreted as being in denial, or suppressed or any of that, but I find in it courage, and also a kind of inspiration.

AMY: Well, I’ve got to say, I have so enjoyed your books. And I think your own writing style is a bit “Mitfordian…” as well. There are descriptions in your books that made me laugh out loud. There’s some humor in there. And it makes you not only a wonderful authority on Nancy Mitford, but also a true Hon. I would encourage our listeners to read Laura’s work, The Six and Life in a Cold Climate. Thank you for the books and thank you for sharing your insight with us today. And I’m also curious, what’s your next passion project? Do you have anything in the works, or somebody that you want to pursue next?

LAURA: Well, first of all, I have enjoyed this so much. You two are just amazing. And you're kind words ... to be called a Hon, I mean, come on, you know, I can die happy. It's just the best. You're so lovely. I do have a book coming out early next year, which is about “the heiress” or the concept of the woman who, from Barbara Hutton all the way back to the girl, Mary Davies, who owned the fields that became London's Belgravia and was put in an asylum because everyone wanted her money. So it’s that whole thing of women and money through history.

KIM: I can’t wait to read that. That sounds so good!

AMY: Yeah, looking forward to that!

KIM: This was a wonderful conversation. We thank you so much for doing this with us. What a pleasure to get to talk about Nancy Mitford and this amazing eccentric and wonderful family.

LAURA: I’ve so enjoyed it, seriously. 

KIM: Thank you so much.

END INTERVIEW

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast, and wow, Kim, how fun was that? 

KIM: That was like being in the Hons’ linen cupboard!

AMY: Oh my gosh, you’re right!

KIM: For a full transcript of today’s show, visit LostLadiesoflit.com, and if you loved this episode, please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps us find new listeners.

AMY: And go read some Nancy Mitford! Bye everyone! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.