The Pursuit of Love / Love in a Cold Climate: Introduction by Laura Thompson (Everyman's Library, 404) - Hardcover

Mitford, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593321278 ISBN 13: 9780593321270

Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A hardcover omnibus of the comic masterpieces that made Nancy Mitford famous: madcap tales of growing up among the privileged and eccentric in England and finding love in all the wrong places.

Nancy Mitford modeled the characters in her two best-known novels on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, visiting their Gloucestershire estate. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children are recklessly eager to grow up.
 
The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice.
 
Love in a Cold Climate focuses on Polly Hampton, long groomed for the perfect marriage by her fearsome mother, Lady Montdore, but secretly determined to find her own path. Together these hilarious novels vividly evoke the lost glamour of aristocratic life in England between the wars.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

NANCY MITFORD (1904–1973) was the eldest daughter of Lord Redesdale. She grew up with her five sisters and one brother on the family estate. A beauty and a wit, she became one of the "bright young things" of the 1920s, and a close friend of Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and their circle. She began writing novels while in her twenties. In all, she wrote eight novels and four biographies (of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XIV, Voltaire, and Frederick the Great).

LAURA THOMPSON is a writer and journalist. She won the Somerset Maugham Award for her first book, The Dogs, and is the author of the critically acclaimed biography of Nancy Mitford, Life in a Cold Climate; The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters; and Agatha Christie: An English Mystery.

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From the Introduction by Laura Thompson

The two novels in this volume were published within four years of each other – the first in late 1945, the second in mid-1949 – and they are viewed, with good reason, as companion pieces. They have an overlapping cast of characters, and the same first-person narrator. They inhabit a near-identical social landscape, that of aristocratic England – and, briefly, Paris – in the years leading up to the Second World War. They are both, essentially, comedic. Yet what always strikes me about The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate is how different they are from each other.
 
The first was written at high speed: ‘my fingers itch for a pen’, as Nancy Mitford put it to her friend Evelyn Waugh, at the start of a book that she completed in three months. It tells her own story, pretty much – the now famous posh–feral Mitford upbringing with six younger siblings, on Cotswold land owned by her father, the second Lord Redesdale; an unsuccessful marriage to a well-born bore; a rapturous love affair with a sophisticated Frenchman – and her ease with her material, her sense of writerly empowerment, is palpable to the reader. Waugh, who suggested the book’s title, described it as ‘planless’, which is not true; although in terms of plot it is certainly simple. It traces the sentimental education of one character – Nancy’s alter ego Linda Radlett – from childhood to young womanhood, from the yearning for love to its discovery. A fi ne instinct led Nancy to use a first-person narrator who was not Linda. Her story is told by her cousin Fanny, the insider-observer with the well ordered life and mind, who retains her serene self-possession even as she selflessly casts another woman’s spell. This overview – reasoned, accepting, taut with foreknowledge – upon a tale that exists so powerfully in the present tense, that is all about the upspring of hope, the faith in happiness, is the literary tension at the heart of the novel. It is also, of course, the philosophic tension at the heart of its author. Nancy is Fanny as well as Linda, and in Love in a Cold Climate, that product of smiling maturity, the voice of sense – rather than sensibility – is dominant. Love is all around, but the novel keeps it at arm’s length. The Pursuit of Love takes love seriously, and like its heroine it is romantic in its soul. Not blindly so, the dangers are visible, but that is how the scales are weighted. Fanny’s experience – a contented family life – is set alongside that of Linda, who after two dud marriages has a deliriously all-consuming affair in Paris, and in this novel there is no real contest.
 
‘Alfred and I are happy,’ Fanny says (to herself) of her academic husband, ‘as happy as married people can be. We are in love, we are intellectually and physically suited in every possible way, we rejoice in each other’s company, we have no money troubles and three delightful children. And yet, when I consider my life, day by day,  hour by hour, it seems to be composed of a series of pin-pricks . . . These are the components of marriage, the whole-meal bread of life, rough, ordinary, but sustaining; Linda had been feeding upon honey-dew, and that is an incomparable diet.’
 
The prose is measured, straightforward. Yet at the same time Pursuit is an effusion, an outbreath of creativity; a continuous poem, studded with descriptions that Nancy is lifting from her mind’s eye, such as the trees, ‘black skeletons against a sky of moleskin’ on a winter’s morning in ‘the beautiful bleak Cotswold uplands’. This was her fifth novel, written when she was forty (she was born in 1904), but it is the first in which she realized to the full her sui generis talent, and in its autobiographical directness it could be an actual first novel – albeit an unusually accomplished one. It is, in fact, a young book. It spoke directly to me when I first read it aged sixteen; indeed I can still recall the delight of recognition at the passage between Linda and her sister, which expresses with such economy the voluptuous boredom of adolescence. ‘ “What’s the time, darling?” “Guess.” “A quarter to six?” “Better than that.” “Six!” “Not quite so good.” “Five to?” “Yes.” ’ Not only does the novel understand youth – those supple extremes of emotion, that shining solipsism – it also re-experiences it, which is not quite the same as remembering. And novels that addressed our most susceptible selves, in our formative years – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, I Capture the Castle – are loved, deep into our adulthoods, with a young person’s limitless passion.
 
When Nancy wrote Pursuit she had achieved only minor acclaim. Her first two novels, Highland Fling (1931) and Christmas Pudding (1932), were modish riffs on the Bright Young Thing theme, a world to which she had half-belonged but never really liked, although friends from that time – Harold Acton, John Betjeman, Waugh – were lifelong. ‘I never had any trouble getting published’, she would later say in a television interview, ‘if I had it would have put me orf completely’, and of course a hugely attractive young woman with connections (her maternal grandfather was the founder of The Lady magazine, where she began her writing career) is always unlikely to struggle. Her third book, Wigs on the Green (1935), which she wrote to earn money when married to the feckless Peter Rodd, who would then steal it from her purse, was a satire on the Fascist movement led by her sister Diana’s future husband, Sir Oswald Mosley. Her fourth, Pigeon Pie (1940) was an absurdist spin on the Phoney War that was over by the time of publication, taking the novel down with it.
 
And one can trace, through each of these progressively accomplished productions, the gradual journey towards simplicity: casting off excesses of plot, replacing self consciously barbed satire with an irresistible, innate desire to see the joke (‘there is always something to laugh at’, as she wrote when close to death), shedding the ‘too too shame-making’ idiom of her unsatisfactory youth and locating the voice inside herself, the inimitable Mitford voice, with its clear concrete language (a Renoir is a ‘fat tomato-coloured bathing-woman’), its priceless quality of unpredictability and the skewed perceptiveness of a clever child (‘You know, being a Conservative is much more restful’, says Linda, after she has ended her marriage to a rich banker and taken up with a dedicated Communist; ‘. . . it does take place within certain hours, and then finish . . .’).
 
Moving to the first-person narrative voice, as Nancy did for Pursuit, was the finishing touch. It enabled her to ‘speak’ to the reader, in a way that is deceptively artless. As a teenager, wedded to the notion that proper literature should be miserable, veering between twin passions for Thomas Hardy and Agatha Christie, I was almost confused by the fact that this novel was so much fun yet so good (it is, one might say, a classic that people want to read, rather than to have read). In an essay of 1951, alluding to the mysterious nature of Nancy’s literary gift, Evelyn Waugh described how she ‘received no education except in horsemanship and French. Liverish critics may sometimes detect traces of this defect in her work. But she wrote and read continually...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Everyman's Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593321278
• ISBN 13: 9780593321270
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 447
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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