The Mitfords in pictures: parties, politics and the real Pursuit of Love
Meet the stranger-than-fiction family behind the BBC drama, who kept horses on the staircase and Nazis in the closet
17 May 2021 • 6:57am
When The Pursuit of Love came out in 1945, Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary: “Nancy has written a novel full of exquisite detail of Mitford family life”. Nancy Mitford never found a muse to match her own family. Even later, when she came to write historical biography, starting with her acclaimed Madame de Pompadour, she couldn’t help turning it into a breed of memoir: “I do love it... They were all exactly like ONE,” she wrote in a letter.
By Princess WeekesApr 26th, 2021, 4:31 pm
Last week, the trailer for upcoming BBC miniseries period drama
The Pursuit of Love was released, and being the literary nerd that I am, once I saw that it was based on a book written by a woman, I ended up going into a deep dive about the author, Nancy Mitford. Nancy Mitford was part of a scandalous and celebrated family where she was one of six sisters (and one brother) whose paths in life all took interesting turns during and following World War II.
If you want a little hint of what’s to come, the sisters were described by The Times journalist Ben Macintyre as: “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur.”