
It occurs to me that some people might not know who the Mitford sisters were. Do you know who the Mitford sisters were? They were the daughters of a minor peer, raised partly in London and partly in Oxfordshire, and were notable for their eccentricities, which is what you call it when rich white people do things that would be unacceptable if they were poor or black. Nancy, the eldest, had a string of husbands and lovers before settling down in Paris with a man she refused to marry but lived very happily with (scandalous at the time). Jessica eloped with an aristocratic communist, and then, much worse, with an American communist. Unity and Diana both got into fascism in a big way; Unity shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany (she survived, but later died essentially due to complications arising from the bullet that was STILL IN HER HEAD). Diana’s second wedding took place in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room. Deborah towed the line a bit more by marrying well, and ended up managing Chatsworth house in her capacity as Duchess of Devonshire. Pamela was mostly into animals, bless her, though that goes for all of them: during Unity’s debutante season, she frequently showed up at balls and parties draped in her pet grass-snake, Enid.
All of this is relevant, because large chunks of both these novels are autobiographical. Just like the Mitfords, the Radlett sisters have no formal education at all, as their father considers it pointless to educate girls; as befits the daughters of a gentleman, they are taught French, and otherwise permitted to read whatever they are able to lay their hands on in the house. They go hunting from a young age, call their mother by her first name, learn the facts of life from a medical dictionary and the Bible, and are utterly unmanageable by anyone, even their cantankerous father, Matthew, who once beat eight German soldiers to death with an entrenching tool.
Most of what I know about the Mitfords consists of amusing anecdotes, so I fully expected these books to be light-hearted exercises in whimsy. There is an extent to which they are: the authorial tone, conveyed through the first-person narration of a cousin of the Radletts, is merrily satirical even when conveying events that are objectively disturbing. It’s an odd combination, but one that works when you consider the warm glow that is cast over the memory of even the darker chapters of a happy childhood. For example, discussing her absent mother’s lovers, the narrator, Fanny, writes:
Rawl had been a white hunter, the only husband she had ever lost respectably through death, having shot him by accident in the head during a safari.
However, whimsy aside, these books actually deal with some heavy subject-matter. The Pursuit of Love, which concerns itself primarily with the second Radlett daughter Linda, follows her through her unhappy marriages, and over the course of the novel her promise and vivacity gradually dwindle. In this she mirrors the career of Fanny’s mother, referred to by the family as “The Bolter” due to her tendency to eject from relationships. With the name removed so as to avoid spoilers, the last line of the novel shows how heavily it could have fallen onto the page if it weren’t for that satirical spark:
‘But I think she would have been happy with [redacted],’ I said. ‘He was the great love of her life, you know.
‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother, sadly. ‘One always thinks that. Every, every time.’
As to Love in a Cold Climate, it is utterly impossible to describe the conflict that ultimately arises without spoiling it completely. Although again narrated by Fanny, it is structured around Polly Hampton, her friend and a neighbour of the Radlett family, who returns from a period in India with her very wealthy and important family to be the most significant and beautiful debutante of the season, but who is clearly desperately unhappy. Polly is overshadowed by her mother, Lady Montdore, a monstrously selfish woman who is utterly unable to comprehend that her ambitions for her daughter and husband might not suit them at all (and who, of course, considers herself to be totally selfless in her service of those ambitions). Most of the best lines fall quite naturally to be delivered by Lady Montdore, who is totally lacking in self-reflection and must have been an absolute delight to write.
There is a major plot point in Love in a Cold Climate that is fairly shocking and will make all but the most perverse feel squeamish. I don’t want to ignore it, but I also don’t want to reveal it. I will, however, reveal that the book features, unusually for a novel written in the 1940s, an openly gay character who is treated positively and is even allowed a happy ending.
These two novels exist somewhere at the intersection of Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse: cheerful satires whose main concern is getting a brood of daughters married well. (I guess Stella Gibbons is a close comparison?) Since I love both Austen and Wodehouse (not to mention Gibbons), this is right up my alley, an unalloyed delight and two heartily recommended novels.
Trigger warning: implied paedophilia.