📚 'Rather Dated' August: Nancy Mitford's 'The Pursuit of Love'📚

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' bookclub. This month we are reading and discussing Nancy Mitford's 'The Pursuit of Love'. Please do add your thoughts when you are ready. Everyone welcome :)

Hello all! I'll start off our discussion with a few observations.

I hadn't read anything by Nancy Mitford before and I enjoyed this very much.
I thought the characters were well drawn and entertaining. I particularly liked Davey and the description of all his ailments. He could have been a useless lump of a hypochondriac, but he was very helpful to Linda and the family. I also loved Lord Merlin and his extravagant manor. Such decadence! Diamond necklaces on whippets! I didn't particularly like Lord Radlett, but he was quite a character.

There was a great deal of humour throughout, even when describing difficult situations such as the displacement of the Spanish in France. Mitford wrote about this with a light hand, but not in a trivial way, I don't think. I loved the relationship between Linda and Fabrice. The question of whether he was the true love of her life was dismissed by 'The Bolter's' comment at the close of the book. I think, however, he was. While it was a short relationship, it was a near perfect one all the same.

Back later!

I’m running a bit behind on this one but will be back as soon as I can with my thoughts!

Picked this up from the library yesterday. I’ll get weaving!

I have loved this book for decades now and it is still my Desert Island book. Davey is a brilliant character and I think Linda and Fanny are brilliantly drawn. I especially love Uncle Matthew and his response to Romeo and Juliet (all the fault of that damn priest).
There have been a lot of TV versions but Judy Dench, Michael Aldridge and Michael Williams in Love in a Cold Climate (the two novels together) is my favourite. Can't believe it was over forty years ago, feels like yesterday!

Oh gosh, one of my favourite books ever! Definitely need a re-read!

Fabrice was based on Nancy Mitford's lover Gaston Palewski who may have been the love of her life but sadly she was not the love of his life, he was a notorious womaniser and married another woman.

I am just heading out but wanted to join-please note my user name...
will be back later with thoughts

Note my user name too!!
Complete Mitford fan.
The pursuit of love is my dessert island book too.
A wonderful witty, poignant novel drawn from her friends and eccentric family.
My comfort read for decades.

I have finished now. This was a reread for me. While I do really like this book, I think Love In A Cold Climate is funnier.

As another Mitford fan, part of the joy of reading The Pursuit of Love is looking for the real-life characters and events mentioned. Uncle Matthew is my favourite character (his intolerance of everything is hilarious) and by all accounts is a very accurate depiction of Nancy’s father, including hunting the children and his claim to have only ever read one book, White Fang. I think Aunt Sadie is also a realistic picture of Nancy’s mother. And as already mentioned Linda’s various suitors reflect aspects of Nancy’s own partners.

I do feel very sorry for poor little Moira - unwanted and shuffled off to her grandparents. At least Linda’s second child has what appears to be a slightly more welcoming home with Fanny’s family.

I absolutely love Nancy Mitford and read and re-read them a lot. Perfect comfort reads.
I have also listened to them on audio books on the dog walk etc and they are fab.
I think Mitford is very clever telling the books through Fanny's eyes.
The descriptions and characters are just wonderful. The Radlets are just brilliantly depicted-from the Hons cupboard chats to the treasures in the safe are such great details. Aunt Sadie's jewels left where she was weeding-never in the safe.

I did a deep dive into the Mitford sisters and they are fascinating.
A huge amount of true anecdotes have made their way into the books.
Capturing Upper Class English life at a moment in time.

Nancy's use of words -like U and Non U are great class indicators of the time-toilet, glass, scent etc.

I think my current fave is also Love in a Cold Climate @ChessieFL
The characters and story is just brilliant-and the people such as Lord and Lady Montdore, Polly, Cedric and Fabrice are just divine.

Just finished. That was such a perfect read, I loved it. I laughed out loud at the description of Davey’s hair slipping off the back of his head like an eiderdown falling off a bed. He was awful with his fussy eating, but very funny. The characters were very well drawn and didn’t, to me, seem at all like caricatures, probably because they were based on NMs own family, and she has such a good eye and ear. I did feel sorry for Moira. And I thought it was so clever, how
NM captured how horrible the war was (the spongy mass of red covered in feathers; how freezing cold the house was) and at the same time maintaining the light tone and scintillating humour. Going to read Love in a Cold Climate next.

Just going to mark my place as I’ve loved this (and LIACC) since I was a teenager so I will have a re-read.

I also love "Don't Tell Alfred" which has Fanny as wife of the Ambassador to Paris, with teenage children and Davey on hand to sort out problems.

Can I suggest an interesting corollary read is India Knight’s “ updated” version.

I had been in two minds about how well this would work and of course it can’t compete with the original. But all in all, I found the exercise in translating it across the decades made an interesting read.

I have read Darling by India Knight and while it cannot compare to the original, it’s not bad as far as these updated retellings of classics go.

Oh dear, I haven’t started it yet, I have so much I need to read at the moment! But I’ve literally just brought it back from the library (only to be presented with our own copy by DH) so I’ll get going today and be back with thoughts asap

I was highlighting some of the more humorous lines as I was reading it. Here are a couple of them;

"'You'll be dyeing the white Leghorns next', said Uncle Matthew scornfully".

'This unlucky medicine chest having played the same part that Marie Antoinette's nécessaire did in the escape to Varennes'.

Joining late as expected. Thanks for starting the thread, @FuzzyCaoraDhubh. I've enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts.

I really loved this book. I drove my DH mad laughing out loud at it frequently. Uncle Matthew, his entrenching tool and his hatred of foreigners was very amusing, and I also enjoyed the bit when Lord Merlin visits Linda in Paris and claims that he has to wear dark sunglasses to hide his "kind eyes" from beggars!

Mitford is a witty and engaging storyteller from start to finish. As with many of our Rather Dated books, I feel it gave some insight into the limited choices women faced at that time - in this case, of course, very privileged upper class women, but who nonetheless were constrained by circumstances, class and gendered expectations. Uncle Matthew's belief that education spoiled women's natural charms was telling.

Fanny somehow survived her childhood and abandonment by The Bolter (I loved it that her family actually addressed her as Bolter!), and was obviously the most stable, contented and emotionally intact of them all - presumably the influence of Aunt Emily, and having had the chance to get an education.

I'm inspired to read more Mitford, that's for sure.

I’ve now finished it too - loved it. Also laughed out loud several times, which is unusual for me with books, but she’s so funny. I’m not as big a Mitfordian as others on here, but I seem to have read quite a lot about the family and their circle, so I recognised quite a few of the ‘real-life’ characters. Lord Merlin was based on Lord Berners, who was just as eccentric and did indeed dye his doves in pastel colours. Davey was Edward Sackville-West, who had a similar obsession with vitamins.

I don’t think there can be much doubt that the Radletts were basically the Mitfords; Jassy seemed so like Jessica, who ended up in America - I loved the line about her being obsessed with either ‘Cary Goon or Gary Coon, I forget which’. All a big tease on one level, I suspect. But it was very clever of Nancy to make Fanny the narrator, so she could slip in lots of jokes, while in fact relating the story in a level of detail she couldn’t possibly have known - though the reader hardly notices this.

I don’t know whether anyone’s read them, but Nancy M’s letters to Evelyn Waugh are hilariously funny and well worth seeking out. The early part of the book covers the period when The Pursuit of Love has just been published, so there’s some interesting (and funny) discussion of it.

It’s a good read. But you can see why she ruffled feathers. If people can identify the characters now ( and they clearly can) it must have been very intrusive at the time.

It might be even easier to identify the characters now, we have access to autobiographies, biographies and letters, not all of which would have been in the public domain at the time the books were written.

Have got back to reading after the Olympics, and finished The Pursuit of Love. I’ve never read any Nancy Mitford before, and know little about their lives, though I realise I must have seen a television adaptation - not the recent one, but quite a while ago - as I recognised the part where Linda runs the bookshop (and puts all the enjoyable reads to the fore, banishing the tracts).
Despite being of the servant class, I loved the Radletts, and could read several more volumes of Uncle Matthew’s alarming approach to childcare and his robust opinions, and the children’s skewed knowledge of the world and their passion for animals. I was not quite as interested in Linda’s search for love, engaging as she is, and I can’t say Fabrice is my ideal man. I preferred Davey and Lord Merlin, who seemed to treat Linda as more of an equal at least.

@ChannelLightVessel def recommend Love in a Cold Climate then!!

Brilliant characters and great fun

I love that hair description too but it's Louisa's sad old husband, not Davey. In the next book I think he takes up a fast and feast diet, much like 5/2- though aunt Emily says his idea of a fast is 3 normal meals!
The Bolter must be based on someone!
Apparently Gaston Palewski who Fabrice was based on was entirely unappealing as well as downright nasty.

I think The Bolter was based on Lady Idina Sackville who lived in Kenya's "Happy Valley". I read a book about her by Frances Osborne, who was her great-grandaughter (and former wife of George).