Fictional Mitfords

I’m way behind on writing about books. This is something that I wrote in 2025 and never published. I’m publishing it now so that I can include it in my 2025 book review post. God willing, I’ll finish that before the end of 2026. 

*****

My life as an American woman in God-help-me 2025 is nothing like the lives of fictional British middle- and upper-class women in the early and mid 20th century. Nor do I want it to be - I wouldn’t want to be either the victim or the beneficiary of the English class system. When it comes to repressive social hierarchies, burn them all down is my motto. 

Still, I love reading about these characters, and so British womanhood in bygone eras seems to be a dominant theme for my reading - well, that, and the state of the world in God-help-me 2025. It’s quite the contrast. I read three of Nancy Mitford’s four novels in 2025. The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, and Don’t Tell Alfred are the stories of the Radlett family and their lives at Alconleigh, the family’s ancestral estate, and beyond. All three are told in the first person by Fanny Logan, the Radletts’ first cousin and daughter of Lady Alconleigh’s sister, known as “the Bolter” because of her history of marrying and abandoning a series of men. 

I read them out of sequence - I started with Love in a Cold Climate and after I finished, I remembered reading that Mitford had written several Radlett novels, and I got my hands on them as quickly as possible. The Pursuit of Love was the first in the series so I read it as a prequel. Don’t Tell Alfred, which I’m in the middle of now, takes place about 20 years after the events of Love in a Cold Climate, when Fanny’s husband, a quiet Oxford don whom we don’t hear from much in the earlier novels, is appointed British Ambassador to France. All of a sudden, unassuming Fanny and cerebral Alfred are thrust into the rarefied worlds of high Paris society and international diplomacy during the Cold War. 

I’d kick like a mule if I was yanked out of my cozy life as the wife of a high-ranking academic at Oxford and thrown headlong into a world of daily parties and reporters and photographers and visiting heads of state; but after overcoming some initial trepidation, Fanny adjusts quickly and becomes interested and invested in her new role. She manages one comic crisis after another, without much help from her beautiful but flighty assistant, and keeps the Ambassador on a need-to-know basis - hence the title. But Alfred is not a fool. He knows what’s up - he just chooses what he sees and what he doesn’t see. 

*****

In the earlier books, especially The Pursuit of Love, the Radlett daughters live in a world of privilege, but not ease. Marriage is their only prospect of independence. The rules of primogeniture dictated that none of the daughters could inherit their father’s considerable wealth, and Lord Alconleigh (based on Nancy Mitford’s real-life father, Lord Redesdale) believes in the rules of primogeniture and does not believe in formal education for women. Lord Alconleigh is also a tyrant - mostly a benevolent tyrant, but a tyrant nonetheless - whose whims and preferences completely dominate the family’s life. The “Hons Cupboard” - a closet that the girls use as a retreat and clubhouse - is their only escape from Alconleigh’s strict rules and erratic discipline. Yes, the Radlett girls live in a stately home on a huge estate where they are tended by servants and never want for anything, but their lives are not their own. Fanny, the first person narrator of all of the Radlett novels, is a little wistful about her own quiet life with her Aunt Emily, compared to the riotous family togetherness of Alconleigh; but she’s also glad to return to her serene and pleasant home after long visits with the boisterous Radletts and the mercurial Uncle Matthew. 

In Love in a Cold Climate, the girls grow up and gain some independence (mostly by marrying rich men). Don’t Tell Alfred is Fanny’s story. After a lifetime as a second banana to her Radlett cousins, Fanny really comes into her own in Paris despite her initial reluctance to leave her life in Oxford. She is surrounded by beauty and elegance and luxury every moment of the day, so much so that she quite sympathizes with her predecessor who refuses to vacate the Embassy, knowing as she does that she also won’t want to leave when her time comes. But even better than the richness of her physical environment is the freedom and autonomy that she enjoys as an older woman (of course, “older” is relative - Fanny is probably about 45 in this book).  Amid the chaos of a hack journalist’s efforts to undermine the Ambassador and his wife, and her socialite secretary’s failure to do much actual work, and her predecessor’s popularity and unwanted presence in the Embassy compound, Fanny perseveres. She outwits her adversaries and becomes a person of importance in Paris. 

*****

I’ve read enough about the Mitford sisters to know that The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are straight-up roman a clef novels in which art imitates life very closely. Lord and Lady Alconleigh are very much like David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford aka Lord and Lady Redesdale; and Linda Radlett must be Diana Mitford. Spoiler alert: Linda Radlett dies tragically at the end of The Pursuit of Love. Nancy Mitford loved her sister Diana, but was horrified by her political beliefs and rightly so because Diana was a Nazi. Maybe Nancy thought that death in childbirth was a better fate for Linda than Diana’s actual fate (imprisonment as a traitor to England during WWII followed by permanent exile from England). Runaway Jassy was obviously Jessica, my favorite Mitford. Even the Hons Cupboard was taken from real life at the Mitford home. 

Don’t Tell Alfred, on the other hand, seems more invented - in a good way. One thing I don’t know about the Mitfords is if they had a cousin like Fanny, or if she’s pure invention. I’ll have to find out, I guess, but I’m inclined to believe that it’s the latter because Fanny is, I think, a combination of Deborah, the youngest Mitford, and Nancy herself. Like Nancy, Fanny finds herself very much at home and at ease in Paris, but like Deborah, she also finds herself successfully managing a large and complex household and navigating the ins and outs of life on a very big stage. It’s a huge change for Fanny - from a quiet life in Oxford as a privileged but dull academic wife to wife of the English Ambassador to France in the postwar years. 

*****

The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are both almost entirely rooted in Mitford family history, with the former written as a tragedy and the latter written as a conventional society novel. Don’t Tell Alfred’s Fanny is informed by Nancy’s real life in Paris, but its events are entirely imagined, and its tone is society drama meets screwball comedy - somewhere between Barbara Pym and P.G. Wodehouse. With these three books, Nancy Mitford proved that as a writer, she could do pretty much anything.