The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

NANCY MITFORD

The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

With a new introduction by India Knight

FIG TREE

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Introduction by India Knight

HIGHLAND FLING

CHRISTMAS PUDDING

WIGS ON THE GREEN

PIGEON PIE

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE

LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE

THE BLESSING

DON’T TELL ALFRED

The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford (1904–73) was born in London, the eldest child of the second Baron Redesdale. Her childhood in a large remote country house with her five sisters and one brother is recounted in the early chapters of The Pursuit of Love (1945), which, according to the author, is largely autobiographical. Apart from being taught to ride and speak French, Nancy Mitford always claimed she never received a proper education. She started writing before her marriage in 1932 in order ‘to relieve the boredom of the intervals between the recreations established by the social conventions of her world’ and had written four novels, including Wigs on the Green (1935), before the success of The Pursuit of Love. After the war she moved to Paris where she lived for the rest of her life. She followed The Pursuit of Love with Love in a Cold Climate (1949), The Blessing (1951) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960). She also wrote four works of biography: Madame de Pompadour, first published to great acclaim in 1954, Voltaire in Love, The Sun King and Frederick the Great. As well as being a novelist and a biographer she also translated Madame de Lafayette’s classic novel La Princesse de Clèves into English, and edited Noblesse Oblige, a collection of essays concerned with the behaviour of the English aristocracy and the idea of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’. Nancy Mitford was awarded the CBE in 1972.

India Knight is the author of three novels: My Life on a Plate, Don’t You Want Me? and Comfort and Joy. Her non-fiction books include The Shops, the bestselling diet book Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet, the accompanying bestselling cookbook Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet Cookbook and The Thrift Book. India is a columnist for the Sunday Times and lives in London with her three children.

Introduction

Note: I can’t stand introductions that contain spoilers. There are none here. It’s safe to read, though frankly you would be more than forgiven for skipping forward a bit and jumping straight in. She’s the azure sea; I’m the annoying pebbles that slightly hurt your toes.

There exists a perception that if you like Nancy Mitford, you only like reading gentle period fiction for nice (upper-) middle-class ladies. Either that, or you’re some sort of sinister worshipper at the Shrine of Mitford, blind to the six sisters’ many faults and a-tremble at their legend, wishing that it were the late 1930s and you had a sibling or two with dubious political leanings and a posh mother obsessed with the effect of wholemeal bread upon ‘the Good Body’. But I don’t, as a rule, enjoy fiction for nice ladies (there are exceptions), and I don’t yearn to be reincarnated as a minor aristocrat with an eccentric family. Charming and compelling as the waves of drooling Mitfordiana are and have been, my love of Nancy comes only from admiration of her stupendous talent as a novelist. She’s unbeatable. She is a brilliant writer and a wonderful stylist; she has the beadiest eye – nothing, but nothing, goes unnoticed; she is almost unbearably funny, and she can make you cry at the flick of a page. All this is done so breezily, so apparently effortlessly, so flowingly, that you’d think there was nothing to it at all. Except there is. The novels have real heft, for all their frothy surface: they’re like beautifully iced cakes made of steel, a description that might also apply to Nancy herself.

As well as being reductive, the idea that Nancy Mitford’s books are somehow ‘nice’ conveniently ignores the fact that there was nothing particularly ‘nice’ about Nancy, either in person or in her writing: she was as sharp as a dagger, and cutting was her forte. Her famous ‘teases’ often leave a sting sharp enough to demand the literary equivalent of an EpiPen – as her brother-in-law Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, found out when a relatively youthful Nancy wrote Wigs on the Green, published in 1935:¹

‘I really don’t quite know what an Aryan is.’

‘Well, it’s quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes.’

Mosley banned Nancy from his home for four years when the book came out, and one can’t imagine that her large, unwieldy sister Unity, who was six foot one and attended deb dances with her pet rat, Ratular – she was also the fascist one who made friends with Hitler before shooting herself in the head on the day England declared war on Germany – was particularly delighted by being caricatured as Eugenia Malmains, ‘England’s largest heiress’ (‘My dog is called the Reichshund, after Bismarck’s dog you know’).

Too much of a deal is also sometimes made of the milieu of Mitford’s novels, as if she had somehow wasted a prodigious talent by writing about people like herself, rather than about weary mothers of twelve living in penury in broken cottages. But she did what good writers do best: write absolutely clear-eyedly and unapologetically about the world she knew back to front and inside out – her own – trusting the reader to be intelligent enough to see that responding to a book has nothing to do with how much, or how little, of your own social circumstances you see reflected within its pages. Mitford is famous for having ‘invented’ U and non-U, where the U stands for ‘upper-class’ usage and the non-U for the aspiring middle-class version. In fact the