The letters of Nancy Mitford - Hardcover

Mitford, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395570417 ISBN 13: 9780395570418

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1993

Synopsis

Nancy Mitford died in 1973 before she could write an autobiography. But she was one of the great letter writers of this century, and her sparkling correspondence to her famous family and to a wide circle of brilliant friends - Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Robert Byron, Cyril Connolly, and Raymond Mortimer, among many others - sheds an extraordinary light on their lives and the times in which they lived.
Novelist, biographer, and journalist, Nancy was born in 1904 into a family that seemed always to he in Britain's headlines - and not only on the society pages. The eldest of Lord and Lady Redesdale's seven talented children (writer Jessica Mitford among them), Nancy immortalized their family life in her first bestseller, The Pursuit of Love. Her natural wit, fed by the frivolous 1920s, was undimmed by her political coming of age in the 1930s, or the courage and stoicism of wartime London. At war's end she moved to Paris, and her home there became "a congenial rendezvous of French and English letters," in the words of her friend Harold Acton. From this perch, Nancy wrote her daily correspondence, delighting in her adopted country and skewering pretension wherever she found it. Wildly funny and filled with outrageous gossip, Mitford's letters detail not only the foolishness and foibles of London and Parisian society, but also the more tragic story of an unhappy marriage and her often anguished affair with "the Colonel," a leading member of de Gaulle's government.
Love from Nancy is the first published collection of Nancy's correspondence. It draws on eight thousand letters spanning six decades, many dashed off with hardly a crossed-out word, all so full of verve that the writer seems to be at one's elbow. It includes an important selection of letters to Evelyn Waugh, her close friend and literary mentor. Whether asking Waugh what Roman Catholics believe awaits them in heaven or soliciting Field Marshal Montgomery's opinion of the latest Paris fashions, these letters give us Nancy Mitford at her provocative and teasing best.

About this title

About the Author

Charlotte Mosley lives in Paris and has worked as a publisher and journalist. She is the editor of Love from Nancy, The Letters of Nancy Mitford, The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh and The Mitfords, Letters Between Six Sisters.

From Kirkus Reviews

The first collection of Nancy Mitford's letters--which, like those of her British literary contemporaries (Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, et. al), reflect a wit and style that never quite mask an underlying anguish at a world changed too much. Born in 1904 and dying in Paris in 1973, Mitford was a diligent correspondent who left behind more than a thousand letters. This collection (edited by her niece), spanning more than 60 years and a hundred correspondents, includes not only letters that provide an epistolary history of Mitford's life but also those that illuminate her relationship with her famous peers and equally famous--or, as often, notorious--sisters: Jessica, author of The American Way of Death; Unity, admirer of Hitler; and Diana, wife of British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Like her friend Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, Mitford's letters are written to or about that brilliant between-the-wars-generation that connected and reconnected in the company of interesting people in stylish milieus like the British embassy in Paris; Chatsworth, the ducal home of Mitford's youngest sister; and the Guinness's Irish castle. Many names here will be unfamiliar--and the need to consult footnotes is an irritant--but what makes the reading worthwhile are letters like the one in which Mitford relates Evelyn Waugh's answer when asked how he reconciled being so horrible with being a Christian. ``He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible.'' Mitford writes with great wit and plucky panache- -making the best of an often unhappy personal life--about her writing, her friends, and contemporary events: the bombing raids in wartime London, Dior's ``New Look,'' the 1968 riots in Paris, etc. A welcome addition to literary history that poignantly recalls the glittering youth and not-so-bright decline and fall of all those ``bright young things'' whom Mitford and Waugh wrote about so well elsewhere. (Photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0395570417
• ISBN 13: 9780395570418
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 538
• Editor: Mosley Charlotte