The Pursuit of Love

Admittedly, I was drawn to The Pursuit of Love because of the author - I was curious about Nancy Mitford's work, given that I'd read much of her, and a book about her (and her sisters), but nothing by her. Happily, the book lived up to my hopes, and it's a delightful, period "classic" in the same vein as Evelyn Waugh or Irène Némirovsky.

As Amazon notes, "The Pursuit of Love is a classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric." In that sense, the Mitfords are just one in a long line of English aristocrats run amok (the Mountbattens and Carnarvons being others of the same "species"), whose dysfunction makes for entertaining reading, particularly from this distance. Mitford was widely known to have drawn liberally from her own family's quirks in creating her characters, particularly Uncle Matthew, the blustering patriarch; contemporaries mourned the passing of both the real man and the fictional one when David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale died in 1958.

The protagonist of The Pursuit of Love is Linda, the most beautiful and wayward daughter, who has been denied a traditional upbringing, never been to school, and falls for a succession of wildly inappropriate men (at least by her family's standards): first a pompous City man, then a deep red Communist, and finally a French duke whose reputation precedes him.

Still, this is a light, fun read, and I was happy to learn upon its conclusion that this is the first of three novels Mitford wrote with this set of characters. I've already added the others to my reading list.

Five stars.