Love from Nancy CL

One summer I read all the Thomas Hardy books in my library. Another I spent reading all I could find on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. This was my Mitford summer.It began with Mary Lovell's, "The Sisters" and I've read most of the Mitford biographies and novels that I could find.I am enjoying this book for the letters and pictures. The footnotes don't bother me because I know who most of the people are from my reading of English history. French phrases don't bother me because I know enough French to be able to understand them altho it is nice to have translations given.I believe young readers may have a problem with this book because they do not understand how it once was. I was a small child during WWII and didn't suffer as much as people in England did. The Mitfords were a wonderfully strange family and readers probably should read Mary Lovell's book first as background.I love Nancy's sharp observations and style. It saddens me that she didn't like Americans. I wonder why. I believe she was one of the most interesting of the Mitford sisters, but they were each special in their own way. I am just so sorry she had such a painful illness at the end. It was very sad to read of her last days.

Letters like these are treasures of intimate understanding that transcend the paparrazzi snapshots and questionable commentary of the contemporary celebrity gossip industry. They are not 100% but certainly more accurate represntations of the information that is not a part of the public identity. Indeed, Nancy Mitford, her family and her celebrated friend, Evelyn Waugh, were represented often in the gossip columns of their lifetimes. To the degree that Lady Redesdale, NM's mother, commented that as soon as she read a headline that said "Peer's daughter..." she knew it would be one of her own. The letters compiled here, relect the 'way' it was at the parties, what NM's often wicked but always colorful take was on the 'important' guests. Some of these were, Princess Margaret in a ghastly mini dress and bouffant hairdo, or Churchill's very less impressive, often drunk, son Randolph, and innumerable royals, politicians and artists, all discussed without awe, or particular excitement, just ordinary people, being foolish or, as she would have it, boors. Nancy Mitford's life spanned a period in history that seems impossibly long, and long ago. People, I have learned, become implanted in a time, for better or worse, and for Nancy this was the age known largely by art as "between the wars." It is those times, in the decadence and continued supremacy of the class system in England, that Nancy could embody the comedy of aristocratic insularity being pummelled by the modern world. Nancy was far more a representative of the old, but capable of making ideological decisions that her sisters and parents despaired of. They, for anyone not already drowned in the subject, went largely pro-German, with one, Unity, an intimate with Hitler before England entered the war. Another, Jessica, was a communist, and transplant to America, for which she was more condemned. The bulk of the correspondence is certainly lively, and in no way self-centered, or particularly dense. This holds true even when death or some other tragedy overtakes her. The oddest to me was her comment that Unity had been taken to a concentration camp and that they would leave her there for a while to learn a few things before getting her out. Either that is British aristocratic detachment that I fail to get, or else she did not know much about concentration camps. The only obstacle to incredible fun reading is the footnote requirements. They certainly are necessary for comprehension of who people are and what they're referencing, but they do make it a bit choppy and annoying. Still, it was an extraordinary time, as Nancy would say, between the fascists and the Bolshies, as well as the hilarious anti-foreigner burlesque that her father's actions brought to life in her novels. They may have appeared extreme however, the letters suggest their accuracy as well as their shared viewpoint, if not enactments, throughout the upper classes of that period. Nancy moved to France after the war and horr