I love Mitford’s THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. According to my blog I’ve read it an embarrassing 7 times. I was thus delighted to come across this book, her third and a very obscure one, quite accidentally. (By accidental, I mean in the Waterstones in John Lewis, when I was looking for a laundry hamper. Why is there a Waterstones in John Lewis? Why is it by the laundry hampers?)
I don’t like any of her other books, but hope springs eternal I guess. Hope was misplaced. It’s dated and awkward. Of interest though is that she was worried about being sued by her sister, the famous fascist Unity Mitford, as it is in part a satire of Unity’s strange, jokey right-wing sensibility as the ‘greatest heiress in England’ (she was 6 ft 1).
As a child, apparently, Unity shared a room with her other sister, Jessica, a committed communist. They divided the room in half with chalk, one side with pictures of Lenin and the other with swastikas. In later life, Unity travelled to Germany where she got a lot less jokey. Apparently she actually dated Hitler, or was at least used by Hitler to make Eva Braun jealous. She later shot herself when war was declared, which I for one am not at all sorry about.
What does inspire me about this book, in a strange way, is how bad it is. The style is close to THE PURSUIT OF LOVE but also very far away. It’s inspiring to see how someone can work through from this very uneven early work to that classic.