Nancy Mitford is best known for such witty novels as Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love. As a writer, she had the good sense to stick to subjects she knew best. In her fiction, rather than invent, she used her own social and family milieu for material, serving it up as irresistible comedy. When she exhausted her possibilities as a novelist, Mitford turned her literary skills to the next best thing and took up writing biographies.
In 1946, the writer moved to Paris, and it is this country that would provide most of the material for her work as a biographer. Mitford later published best-selling books on Madame de Pompadour and Voltaire.
The Autobiography That was Never Written
The last four and a half years of Nancy’s life were spent in an agony of pain as she slowly died from a rare form of cancer. During this period, as she tried to cope without taking pain killers, fearful of what it would do to her intellectual powers, she discussed writing her own autobiography. Yet as she wrote in one of the letters in this collection, it was simply not possible to plan and write a whole book while in such unrelenting pain. Writers need to be in a relatively peaceful state of mind.
Love From Nancy
This fine collection’s editor, Charlotte Mosley, is married to Nancy Mitford’s nephew, Alexander. She has published numerous letter collections of the Mitford sisters, including the extraordinary Letters Between Six Sisters.
In Love From Nancy, Mosley presents letters by Mitford written between 1904 and her death in 1973. The correspondents represent a broad cast of people, from her mother and sisters, to eminent literary figures like her friend Evelyn Waugh.
Nancy Mitford knew the value of her letters, describing them to her sister Deborah as ‘unique in this generation and as such there can’t be too many of them’. By the late 1940s she was already suggesting to Evelyn Waugh that their correspondence might be turned into a book. Hence Love From Nancy can almost be read as the autobiography that Mitford never got to write.
Life, Love and Literature
The letters themselves show a busy life well lived. Nancy plainly says in some of the letters that she enjoys life from sun rise to sun down, and can’t understand how people could be unhappy. Although her marriage failed early, and her long love affair with French politician Gaston Palewski was in many aspects a deep disappointment, she always remained cheerful and made light of her difficulties. It seems she kept her sanity by enjoying the simple pleasures of life: solitude, reading, and good friendships.
For readers who are fascinated by the literary process, there is much rewarding material on Nancy’s attitude to her own writing and her acceptance of her artistic and intellectual limitations.
When Evelyn Waugh chides her that she should put more effort into rewriting Love in a Cold Climate, she replies that she puts in her very best effort into her books, and that her limitations as a writer must be accepted.
This is one of the charms of the letters, Nancy’s refusal to take herself too seriously. Most writers are prickly about their work, but Mitford could take a realistic view of her literary achievements. She didn’t criticise herself too harshly for not being able to turn out first order literary classics, and rather saw herself as an honest working woman, making a decent living out of her writing and remaining financially independent.
The most painful letters in this collection cover Nancy’s last four and a half years, as she endured unbearable and constant pain due to her cancer. Her endurance of this relentless suffering, her refusal to complain or pity her situation, is nothing short of heroic. The pain was so bad she lost her faith in God, and claimed she would not even wish such suffering on Hitler.
Reading through these five hundred pages of correspondence, which has been culled down from a total of eight thousand extant letters, you wonder how Nancy found the time to write so much and to so many people. In the electronic age of e-mails and text messages, the art of such letter writing may be gone forever.
Love From Nancy shows the busyness and bustle of life: the pain of love affairs, the love of friends, the joy of living and the courage needed for dieing.
Published by Hodder and Stoughton, 1993. ISBN 0340537841
Chris Saliba - Chris Saliba is a freelance writer. Read more of his workplace articles at chrissalibafreelancewriter.blogspot.com
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