The Pursuit of Love (original 1945; edition 2010)

What a gem! ( )

This book was nothing like I thought it would be. I found it to be a funny book with quirky characters. The narrator is Fanny and the story is about her cousin Linda pursuing love. It begins when they are children and describes what life was like at the family home Alconleigh. Uncle Matthew who believes that hunting is the way of life; and even hunts for his children to give the hounds something to look for; Aunt Sadie who puts up with Uncle Matthew; the seven Radlett children - including Linda; Linda jealous of Fanny for having wicked parents that left her to be raised by Aunt Emily. As children Linda was in love with the Prince of Wales and Fanny with a farmer. Eventually Fanny and Linda both marry, but only Fanny stays with her husband. Linda's missteps at love is the focus of the story. I found myself very fond of Linda. Growing up she wasn't taught to cook or clean, but to hunt and ride horses. I found the book very funny. It shows a lot of British society around WWII. Linda fit in with certain groups that liked to chat, but in others she fell flat and was a disappointment. ( )

A charming look at love in all its manifestations, from romantic to bourgeois and finally to true love: Linda is constantly led by her many sweeping emotions. Mitford, however, looks at it from a detached, humorous yet sympathetic eye; never does the story through its many meanders turn to melodrama or social judgements. The tale stays light and forgiving as it describes with a certain cynicism a now foregone society.
A wonderful story ( )

Nancy Mitford's semi-autobiographical Pursuit of Love is an interesting book, a kind of upper-class British farce with a streak of melancholia and shrewdness running underneath.

The Radletts are unconventional, even by the standards of literary interwar British aristocracy. Linda and cousin Fanny spend their days dreaming of falling in love whilst Lord Radlett literally hunts them across the properties. As the years tick by, narrator Fanny loses her childish dreams, but Linda pursues them with a frenzy.

I enjoyed this book. Fanny is an affectionate, yet discerning narrator - easily able to see the foibles in her family and just easily love them. This is not exactly a light comedy a la Heyer or Wodehouse - though it shares much of their arch tone. Nor is it Brideshead Revisited or similar deconstructions. In truth, it's a combination of the two, and it reminded me more than anything of Trollope in some ways - though it's much breezier and forthrightly humorous.

The book also covers a long period of time, beginning shortly after the end of WWI, and finishing around WWII's conclusion. Again, this passage of years is unusual for a comedic British novel, and it did lend the book a somewhat bittersweet edge. Underpinning Linda's romantic shenanigans is a story of frustration, disappointment, and in many ways ill-treatment. This - and Fanny's sideways acknowledgements of it - give the book a dissonant tone. It's not a bad thing, but it definitely breaks the novel out of genre, I feel.

For all this, one thing that's wholly unquestioned is class. Money is no object to the Radletts in the sense that it's not something to even be considered, ever - and the wads of cash financing their many adventures is never really considered nor commented on, but rather viewed as a natural state. It's an interesting ellipsis in an otherwise sharp-eyed book.

The Pursuit of Love is decidedly a pursuit - it's a fast-paced novel that gets through a hell of a lot in its 200-odd pages. With such slender demands on a reader, there's certainly enough here to justify a read. ( )

I have had something of a Mitford addiction in the past – reading many, though not all, of Nancy’s novels and devouring several of the many books written about this extraordinary family. The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are of course Nancy Mitford’s best known novels, and I have wanted to re-read them for some time.
In this novel undoubtedly her most autobiographical novel Nancy Mitford used her famous wit to lift the lid on the absurdities of aristocratic life – particularly the aristocratic life of the Mitford family.
Fanny – our narrator – having been dumped by her mother The Bolter (a thinly disguised Lady Idina Sackville) has been brought up by her aunt Emily, and spends holidays with her cousins the Radletts at Alconleigh a large uncomfortable house in the country. Aunt Sadie – sister to Emily and The Bolter is the vague mother to seven children. Uncle Matthew (again a thinly disguised Lord Redesdale – Nancy’s father) roars and stomps around the estate, hunting is his favourite occupation, and so when fox hunting is out of season he hunts the children instead. Constantly railing against anything he sees as foreign or anti British Uncle Matthew, dreadfully un-pc and terrifying to the children, is really quite hilarious.

“Uncle Matthew went with Aunt Sadie and Linda on one occasion to a Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet. It was not a success. He cried copiously, and went into a furious rage because it ended badly. “All the fault of that damned padre,” he kept saying on the way home, still wiping his eyes. “That fella, what’s his name, Romeo, might have known a blasted papist would mess up the whole thing. Silly old fool of a nurse too, I bet she was an R.C dismal old bitch.”

Life at Alconleigh is one of large unheated rooms, teasing and gossiping in the hons cupboard – the one warm place in the house. The Radlett children are unschooled, as Uncle Matthew doesn’t believe in schools, and so they are instead the charges of a governess. Of the Raddlett children Linda is the one closest to Fanny, a hopeless romantic, she is destined to marry badly twice before finding the love of her life. Growing up with her cousins running slightly wild at Alconleigh –when not living quietly with her dear Aunt Emily, Fanny learns about love through Linda, before marrying her own quiet Oxford Don.

“She was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, but it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can’t imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him.”

Linda lives outside the conventions of the day – just as Nancy’s sister Diana had – and horrifies her parents when her first marriage ends. Yet she resolutely pursues her own idea of love, finding it eventually in Paris as the world lies on the brink of war.
I find The Pursuit of love a wonderfully funny and touching novel, Nancy Mitford was a famous tease and in The Pursuit of Love she teases wonderfully, using her own wonderfully eccentric family as the model for her characters. ( )