Nancy Mitford (1904–1973)

I pulled this off the shelf to re-read because I needed something to get the 'romance' square on my book bingo board. There are love stories here, but it's not a romance in either the 2020s sense or the Anthony Trollope sense. There's no wooing, no will-they won't-they, no chase and be chased.
But then the title is The Pursuit of Love, not The Pursuit of Romance.
The characters who find it the easiest are mostly in the background.
In the foreground are Fanny's mother, "the Bolter", who left her show more husband and Fanny as soon as she could, and Linda, who left her husband and daughter as soon as she could. Mostly Linda. Who after leaving her "traditional life" husband, falls for a Communist, then leaves him when he cheats on her, and falls hard for Frenchman Fabrice, who scoops her up at a Paris train station, where Linda is stranded. I guess all her running did lead to love in the end, both on her part and, surprisingly, on his. Then the Nazis invade France.
I want unexpected and quirky details in novels, and liked the amount I got. Like the girl whose dream always was to raise a baby badger. And the gentleman who proposed to his wife by the cage of a two-headed nightingale at the White City.
And I also got the humor I like to have, even in a "serious" novel. Like:
Being a Conservative is much more restful ..., though one must remember that it is bad, not good. But it does take place during certain hours, and then finishes, whereas Communism seems to eat up all one's life and energy.
And: "I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting, we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework, people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened." She sighed. show less

This was a surprise. I was expecting something more Wildean or Wodehousean. Instead I got something funny and poignant. Mitford mixes insight into human character with gently mocking observations on her social class. It wasn't uproariously funny, but I laughed a couple of times. I enjoyed the observations made about love, marriage and family, and the acknowledgement that we put up with monstrous people within our closest circles in order to keep family life on an even keel. The families in show more the book might be exaggerated, and their social existence alien to most of us, but they face the same issues of being human as anyone else. show less

this is a load of fun, but retains enough spikiness to not be cosy or predictable.
It is narrated by Fanny, a cousin of the Radletts, a large family of children who Aunt Sadie & Uncle Matthew produced and don't quite seem to know what to do with. Fanny gets deposited in the family for the holidays, and so we see the family through her eyes. The story focusses on Linda, the second daughter and closes in age to Fanny. They come out together and while Fanny finds a steady husband, Linda's love show more affairs follow a rather more tortuous path, the course of true love never did run smooth.
It's all very upper class, but the author has wit enough to see that and is spiky enough to skewer the idea that this is a story of privilege. It is funny, in a sly way, and touching by turns. The ending caught me completely by surprise. show less

Trashily enjoyable, Love in a Cold Climate casts a delightfully cold and acerbic eye over aristocratic English society in the 1930s, aided by Mitford's deft (and often malicious) way with characterisation. I don't know that I would read much more of her work--Mitford is very much of her time with regards to certain, uh, social assumptions and stereotypes, and this is almost ridiculously frothy--but as a once-off read, it is a lot of fun.