Bibliography
Recommend a title for bookclub
Click on a title to buy it, read other users' comments or to post your own comment:
- Highland Fling, 1931
- Christmas Pudding, 1932
- Wigs on the Green, 1935
- Pigeon Pie, 1940
- The Pursuit of Love, 1945
- Love in a Cold Climate, 1949
- The Blessing, 1951
- Madame de Pompadour, 1954
- Voltaire in Love, 1957
- Don't Tell Alfred, 1960
- The Water Beetle, 1962
- The Sun King, 1966
- Frederick the Great, 1970
A Good Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| The Pursuit of Love | 2 |
Genres
Categorization is odious. There is tremendous overlap among genres. These pigeonholes are offered only as a convenience.
Nancy Mitford (1904 - 1973)
added by Marian
Comments
Please consider recommending where to begin reading this author, or where not to. A few words about your experiences reading this author and why you make the recommendations you do will be helpful to other users. If you are the author or have studied this author extensively, please say so.
The Mitford sisters were remarkable and famous for being brilliant and talented and very unlike each other, especially in their politics. They wrote about each other, and part of the pleasure of reading their memoirs and fictionalized memoirs is getting to know them all.
Start with THE PURSUIT OF LOVE and LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE, which are usually published in a single volume. If you love these people, then you can read the rest of Nancy Mitford's novels, then skip to her sister Jessica Mitford's memoir HONS AND REBELS (published in the USA as DAUGHTERS AND REBELS). And yes, that's THE Jessica Mitford, "muckraking journalist" and author of THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH.
Biography
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From Wikipedia
The Honourable Nancy Freeman-Mitford, CBE (28 November 1904–30 June 1973), novelist and biographer.
She was born in London, the eldest daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale. She is one of the noted Mitford sisters, was an essayist in, and editor of, Noblesse Oblige (1956), in which she famously helped to originate the famous 'U', or upper-class, and 'non-U' classification of linguistic usage and behaviour (see U and non-U English) — although this is something she saw as a bit of a tease rather than a serious matter. She is best known for her series of novels about upper-class life but she also wrote three well-received biographies.
In 1933, after a going-nowhere romance with homosexual Scottish aristocrat Hamish St Clair-Erskine, she married The Hon. Peter Rodd, the youngest son of the 1st Baron Rennell. (Lord Rennell was a British Ambassador to Italy, a former poet, and possibly a one-time lover of Oscar Wilde according to historian Neil McKenna). The Rodds, who were separated for many years, were divorced in 1958 (although Nancy's surname appears as Rodd on her headstone). At the end of the Second World War she moved to Paris, partly to be near French soldier and politician Colonel Gaston Palewski (Charles de Gaulle's Chief of Staff), whom she always called 'Colonel' and with whom she had a relationship in London during the war. The largely one-sided affair, which inspired the romance between Linda Kroesig and Fabrice de Sauveterre in Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love, lasted fitfully until Palewski's affair with and eventual 1969 marriage to Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duchess of Sagan (1915-2003), a beautiful socialite who was the former wife of Count James de Pourtalés and a granddaughter of American railroad magnate Jay Gould.
Nancy Mitford was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1972.
Nancy Mitford died of cancer on 30 June 1973 in Versailles. Her remains were brought home to England and are interred in the Swinbrook Churchyard in Oxfordshire with those of her younger sisters, Unity Mitford (1914-1948), Diana, Lady Mosley (1910-2003) and Jessica (1917-1996).
She was the author of:
Highland Fling (1931)
Christmas Pudding (1932)
Wigs on the Green (1935)
Pigeon Pie (1940)
The Pursuit of Love (1945)
Love in a Cold Climate (1949)
The Blessing (1951)
Madame de Pompadour (1954)
Voltaire in Love (1957)
Don't Tell Alfred (1960)
The Water Beetle (1962)
The Sun King (1966)
Frederick the Great (1970)
Marian February 3rd, 2006 09:21 PM PST