I’ve built up a bit of a backlog but I doubt I’ll write about every book I’ve read this year, even if I wanted to. Some were, perhaps, a little too forgettable. Others, maybe, too well-documented by other people already. The latter of which is not to say The Pursuit of Love (1945, UK) by Nancy Mitford has not had its fair share of reviews in the seventy-five years since it was published. It has also, in fact, been recently adapted for television. And yes, I did watch the TV series after I’d read the book.
The Pursuit of Love is Mitford’s fifth novel, and a departure from her previous books. They were comic, third-person narratives about an extended cast of Bright Young Things and their families. The Pursuit of Love is a serious, first-person narrative about… an extended cast of Bright Young Things and their families.
Fanny is the sort-of adopted daughter of the Radlett family, an old money aristocratic family, with more of the old and less of the money, and is closest to her sort-of sister Linda. Fanny’s mother is still alive, and known as “the Bolter” because she moves from boyfriend to boyfriend (sadly, it’s not as open-minded as it seems, as she’s treated as an object of ridicule). I don’t actually remember what happened to Fanny’s father. Anyway…
The Pursuit of Love is Linda’s story, as told by Fanny. Linda is desperate to escape her eccentric, and hugely racist, father, and her no longer so rich family — is it still “genteel poverty” if they live in a stately home? She marries a banker — and I’ve read enough Georgette Heyer to know the aristocracy and “Cits” do not mix, and this was apparently still true 150 years after the period when most of Heyer’s novels were set…
However, the marriage proves ill-judged, and Linda takes up with a Bohemian/Communist sort. This section of the novel reminded me of Lawrence Durrell’s debut novel, Pied Piper of Lovers (1935, UK), although Durrell was an actual Bohemian sort at that time. Mitford’s description of the scene feels somewhat second-hand in comparison.
Linda follows her new husband to France, to help refugees from the Spanish Civil War. But he proves too committed to the cause, and to an old friend of Linda’s who appears there, so Linda heads north and ends up in Paris. Where she is “rescued” by le Duc de Sauveterre, a notorious, but rich, womaniser. She falls under his spell, and finds herself truly in love for the first time.
There’s a sense of continual low-grade astonishment throughout the narrative of The Pursuit of Love, a surprise that Linda should live her life the way she does and that, despite its tragic end, she should eventually find true happiness. Fanny always wants the best for Linda, but never actually agrees with her life-choices. True, Fanny’s world-view is very much over-shadowed by her own upbringing, and the near-constant absence of her own mother, the Bolter. It makes the novel read more like a confessional than simply a first-person novel, and is somewhat jarring having read Mitford’s previous novels.
But it works, it works very well. Admittedly, I think pretty much every single character in the book should have been strangled at birth, as the aristocracy are a blight on any society; but Mitford manages to make several — Fanny and Linda, at the very least — sympathetic. I suspect the rest of the cast would have been more sympathetic to readers at the time of publication, but that has aged very badly.
If you’re going to read one Nancy Mitford novel, then The Pursuit of Love is the one to read (to be fair, I still have two more by her to read as I write this). It’s not as explicitly comic as her earlier books, but it is very funny in parts. It’s also much more serious in tone — although its topic may not be as serious as Wigs on the Green (1935, UK; see here) — and Fanny’s matter-of-fact voice means it handles its seriousness with admirable constraint.
The BBC adaptation, on the other hand… I wasn’t convinced the modern-day soundtrack worked, but the staging was otherwise exemplary. An excellent cast, too. And if the Bolter, played by Emily Mortimer, had a somewhat larger role than in the novel, writer and director Emily Mortimer earned it. Perhaps the adaptation concertina’d the book’s plot somewhat, but that’s a familiar complaint of television adaptations. It managed to maintain the same tone throughout as the novel. It certainly demonstrated that— whether comparing novels or television adaptations — The Pursuit of Love and Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall are very different books, for all they share a social class and time period; and while Waugh’s may be funnier, it’s also a great deal more racist, snobbish and sexist. Mitford has aged much better.
Having now read six of Mitford’s eight novels, I can’t say I hold her books in especially high esteem. There are other female British writers from the first half of last century I think much better and more worth reading. But I’m glad I have read, and am still reading, her; and I think she provides a vital counterpoint to the career of Evelyn Waugh, who has been seen as far more important in English literature than I think he deserves.
