Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford
by Charlotte Mosley (Editor), Nancy Mitford
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Nancy Mitford died in 1973 before she could write an autobiography. But she was one of the great letter writers of this century, and her sparkling correspondence to her famous family and to a wide circle of brilliant friends - Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Robert Byron, Cyril Connolly, and Raymond Mortimer, among many others - sheds an extraordinary light on their lives and the times in which they lived. Novelist, biographer, and journalist, Nancy was born in 1904 into a family that seemed show more always to he in Britain's headlines - and not only on the society pages. The eldest of Lord and Lady Redesdale's seven talented children (writer Jessica Mitford among them), Nancy immortalized their family life in her first bestseller, The Pursuit of Love. Her natural wit, fed by the frivolous 1920s, was undimmed by her political coming of age in the 1930s, or the courage and stoicism of wartime London. At war's end she moved to Paris, and her home there became "a congenial rendezvous of French and English letters," in the words of her friend Harold Acton. From this perch, Nancy wrote her daily correspondence, delighting in her adopted country and skewering pretension wherever she found it. Wildly funny and filled with outrageous gossip, Mitford's letters detail not only the foolishness and foibles of London and Parisian society, but also the more tragic story of an unhappy marriage and her often anguished affair with "the Colonel," a leading member of de Gaulle's government. Love from Nancy is the first published collection of Nancy's correspondence. It draws on eight thousand letters spanning six decades, many dashed off with hardly a crossed-out word, all so full of verve that the writer seems to be at one's elbow. It includes an important selection of letters to Evelyn Waugh, her close friend and literary mentor. Whether asking Waugh what Roman Catholics believe awaits them in heaven or soliciting Field Marshal Montgomery's opinion of the latest Paris fashions, these letters give us Nancy Mitford at her provocative and teasing best. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
I was very sad to finish this. Through her letters Nancy has been my companion for long enough that I will really miss her wit and company. Fortunately the book is full of post-its marking references to other authors I want to check out.
It is fascinating to share Nancy's life with her. She gives nothing away about her feelings but the people and places in her life are so interesting and varied that it will be good to explore the background to her life and the people who inhabited it. Charlotte Mosley is an excellent editor giving so much information and putting in context happenings of time
Every letter interesting. Her reputation is well deserved.
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- People/Characters
- Nancy Mitford
- Epigraph
- I thought of writing down the bald facts of my life, not for publication but as a record. But they are so very odd I wonder if people would believe. Do you think everybody's real life is quite different from what they manag... (show all)e to make it seem? Very likely. No dark secret, but everything different from the façade.
NM to Evelyn Waugh, 31 January 1951
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- Languages
- English
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- Paper
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- 3
- ASINs
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