Love in a Cold Climate is such a wonderfully witty novel it opened my eyes to the possibilities of comedic writing. Despite the glamorous Radlett and Hampton families, Nancy Mitford provides us with a sensible and down to earth narrator in Fanny. Not nearly as beautiful or as wild as her exotic cousins, Fanny is far easier to identify with and the novel is an eloquent reminder that the best way to write about frivolous young things, is from the vantage point of the outsider looking in.
February 2011 Guest Editor Carmen Reid on Nancy Mitford...
I gobbled up all of Nancy Mitford’s books when I was a young teenager. I loved them. I still re-read them every now and again and Nancy never lets you down. All human life is here, but through splendidly upper-class goggles. Dating and mating was never so posh, so gossipy and so utterly scandalous. The Pursuit of Love and Love In a Cold Climate are full of life and wit and all kinds of fascinating love affairs. For me, Fabrice was the ultimate romantic hero - a Parisian lover, who gave gifts of fur coats and silk knickers! Nancy brought unimaginable glamour and sophistication to my reading life.
Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class, and includes an introduction by Philip Hensher in Penguin Modern Classics. Nancy Mitford's brilliantly witty, irreverent stories of the upper classes in pre-war London and Paris conjure up a world of glamour, gossip and decadence. In The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing, her extraordinary heroines deal with armies of hilariously eccentric relatives, the excitement of love and passion, and the thrills of the social Season. But beneath the glittering surfaces and perfectly timed comic dialogue, Nancy Mitford's novels are also touching hymns to a lost era and to the brevity of life and love from one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of the language. Nancy Mitford (1904-1973) was born in London. A member of one of the aristocracy's more eccentric families, and educated at home with a clutch of siblings, Mitford used childhood experience, lightly fictionalised, in her comic novels, including The Pursuit of Love (1945). She also wrote biographies, translated from the French and edited a celebrated symposium on English Aristocrats. If you enjoyed Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels, you might like Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Very funny ... inimitable and irresistible ... one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of English this century' Philip Hensher
