I think I mentioned my Mitford binge from earlier this year. I bought this book that contained both Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and the Pursuit of Love — so good! I read them a million times.
She is a little like Evelyn Waugh, with whom she was apparently good friends, also a little like a very rich aristocratic Dorothy Parker. Then I read Jessica Mitford’s book of letters (surely as long as Bleak House but finished in one greedy gulp) that came out earlier this year, which was also excellent and fascinating, and a source of funny anecdotes about the Bay Area in the 1950s onward.
I was at the library earlier and saw this book, “The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family” by Mary S. Lovell, whose cover looks almost exactly like Love in a Cold Climate so I had to read it. The book is fastidiously researched, but deeply weird. She will have five sentences in a row that are carefully sourced like, “She dated so-and-so for five years. She always made him roast beef for dinner on Thursdays,” each one carefully footnoted to a letter or interview, but always followed by something totally from left field like “but it’s unlikely that they ever had sex” or “I don’t think she knew Hitler was a Nazi” (two of the girls ended up as these sort of Hitler acolytes) with no attribution whatsoever. Very weird.
Also, the authoress seems to have fallen under the sway of the fascist sister Diana, so there are long sections about how beautiful Diana is to this day, how fascism is not so bad, and in the creepiest bit of all, something about how Oswald Mosley (which, by the way, seems like a great name for a Jackie Collins character) was not particularly racist or anti-Semitic; he just had an agenda of in favor of European unification and against “non-European immigration” into Europe.
In sum, a very creepy little book, but the pictures are good. Also, I recommend Nancy and Jessica’s books and correspondence.
