The Pursuit of Love
Mitford modeled her characters on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, who stays with them at Alconleigh, their Gloucestershire estate. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children, despite the delights of their unusual childhood, are recklessly eager to grow up. The first of three novels featuring these characters, The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice.
Review: I've been dying to read Nancy Mitford's novels since I read the biography of the famous sisters entitled The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell and became entranced by the never-ending intrigues and details of the six sisters' lives. Although four of the Mitford girls were published writers, Nancy is the most well-known and The Pursuit of Love is her most well read and well known novel, and the first in a trilogy entitled Radlett & Montdore. This novel is about the Radlett family, a rambunctious family with seven children, a blustering patriarch, and a well-intentioned but inattentive mother. The story is told from the perspective of niece and frequent visitor to Alconleigh, the Radlett estate, Fanny.
Of course, having read a Mitford biography, I was immediately struck by the nearly identical world of the Radletts, which mirrors the Mitford family. The novel feels like just a slightly distorted version of reality, with name changes. David and Sydney Mitford show up in the characters Aunt Sadie and Uncle Matthew, runaway daughter Jessica shows up as runaway daughter Jassy, and so on. The daughters secret themselves in a warm cupboard in a secret society of "Hons" and guests are frequently subject to the blustering of the unsocial father, just as Nancy experienced in childhood. It seems as if Mitford has plundered her own childhood for the plot of this novel with great success. Perhaps the only significant alteration is the character of Linda, who seems to be a combination of sisters Diana and Deborah Mitford, with a splash of Nancy herself.
In some ways, Mitford's novel seems reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh's Bridehead Revisited, which is also set in the interval between the two world wars. This is fitting of course, since Nancy was friends with Evelyn. Mitford shares huge, emotionally fraught details in a couple lines and then quickly moves on to dwell on fairly inconsequential details like clothing or artwork. Rather than dwelling on the horror of war and the bombings on London, Linda is appalled by train travel; "she had never before sat up all night in a train, and the experience appalled her; it was like some dreadful feverish illness, when the painful hours drag by, each one longer than a week" (145).
The structure of the narrator being a rather minor character in terms of plot development seemed reminiscent of the time in which Mitford wrote and somewhat old-fashioned. However, it did allow Mitford to distance herself enough from her subject matter in order to have some perspective and poke fun at characters who mirror herself and her family.
Overall though, The Pursuit of Love is a witty novel, poking fun at the lives of English aristocracy and the notions they have about love. The main character, Linda, first marries a politician, then a Communist, before falling in love with the very unsuitable and French Fabrice. Like her mother, Linda is a disinterested and also very absent mother - "To think I ruined nine months of my life in order to have that" (190). Narrator Fanny thinks Linda is clearly living an unrealistic life, comparing her own steady marriage to Linda's fairy tale-like love affair with Fabrice saying, "Alfred's not infrequent bouts of moodiness, his invariable complaints at meals about the pudding, the way he will always use my tooth-paste and will always squeeze the tube in the middle. These are the components of marriage, the wholemeal bread of life, rough, ordinary, but sustaining; Linda had been feeding upon honey-dew, and that is an incomparable diet" (188). In effect, the author is poking fun at herself since she is much more like the conflicted-in-love Linda than the ever faithful Fanny.
But the beauty of this novel is its sly and witty delivery, and the fact that fiction has made identifiable individuals larger than life within its pages. Otherwise, the captivating story of the Mitfords may not be told, because like the Mitfords, the "Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives" (13).
Stars: 3
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