| | 
|
|
 |
|
The Pursuit of Love
& Love in a Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford. Vintage Books (paperback): 2001. ISBN: 0679600906. 468 pages.
Guide not available
|
| |
|
Here's a real bargain. Two fabulously clever stories for the price of one. Author Nancy Mitford is now deceased, but her legacy of deliciously wicked and gleefully satiric literature lives on in this pairing of her two most popular novels, set in aristocratic England between the two World Wars.
According to Nancy's sister Jessica, the Radlett family members who wreck havoc at random across these pages are based upon the Mitford family itself. Depending on how you look at it, this could be either a good thing or a bad thing. It's really all a matter of how you feel about the fabulously crabby Uncle Matthew hunting his own children when foxes are few and far between. In terms of their value as fictional characters, however, there is no doubt at all that Uncle Matthew, his infallibly sedate wife Sadie, the seven Radlett children and their cousin Fanny make for some of the most endearing and unusual people we are ever likely to meet in literature. The first novel, The Pursuit of Love, chronicles the determined efforts of Linda Radlett, the family beauty, to make an utter disaster of her love-life; the second, Love in a Cold Climate, tells the story of the gorgeous but somewhat vacant Polly Hampton, whose treacherous affair with a family friend threatens to destroy the happiness of pretty much everybody.
|
| |
| |
contact us
