Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford is the most well known of the Mitford sisters. The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are considered standard reading among Anglophiles. The eldest of the Mitford children, she was of the generation known as the Bright Young Things, the generation satirized by her friend and fellow Bright Young Thing Evelyn Waugh in his book Vile Bodies. Her debutante photographs where done by Cecil Beaton, the most sought after photographer and chronicler of the age. Unlike her siblings, she never took to politics and instead she threw herself into writing, mainly books that where parodies of her family with the characters thinly veiled.

Much like the people she wrote about, she never had fulfillment in love, placing her heart time and again with the wrong man. Yet where she wasn't a success in affairs of the heart the same couldn't be said about her writing career. "The Pursuit of Love was a phenomenal best seller and made her financially independent." This allowed her to relocate to Paris, where she spent her time writing biographies about French luminaries like Madame Pampadour and Voltaire. Yet it is her comedic sensibilities and sense of humor that people remember in both her novels and her various contributions to newspapers.

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