Nancy Mitford (1904-1973) was born in London, the eldest child of the second Baron Redesdale. She had written four novels, including Wigs on the Green (1935), before the success of The Pursuit of Love in 1945, which she followed with Love in a Cold Climate (1949), The Blessing (1951) and Don't Tell Alfred (1960). She also wrote four works of biography. Nancy Mitford was awarded the CBE in 1972.

Nancy Mitford

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Available together for the first time in many years, and here in one edition, are ALL eight of Nancy Mitford's sparklingly astute, hilarious and completely unputdownable novels, with a new introduction by India Knight. 
 
 Published over a period of 30 years, they provide a wonderful glimpse of the bright young things of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties in the city and in the shires; firmly ensconced at home or making a go of it abroad; and what the upper classes really got up to in peace and in war.

The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

BBC Radio adaptations of Nancy Mitford's most famous novels and acclaimed biography of Madame de Pompadour plus bonus programmes 
 
 The eldest of the notorious Mitford sisters, Nancy Mitford was renowned for her comic novels of upper-class life. An aristocrat and socialite, she mingled with the 'Bright Young Things' in interwar London, and went on to satirise their foibles in razor-sharp, wickedly funny prose. Collected here are adaptations of her two bestsellers, the semi-autobiographical The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate; her delightful biography of Louis XV's chief mistress; and a pair of fascinating programmes exploring her own unconventional life. 
 
 The Pursuit of Love 
 This bittersweet tale follows the fortunes of Fanny Logan and her eccentric aristocratic cousins, the Radletts, as they embark on disastrous love affairs and misconceived marriages while searching for Mr Right. 
 
Cast 
 Lord Radlett - Rolf Lefebvre 
 Lady Radlett - Joan Matheson 
 Fanny - Susan Maudslay 
 Linda - Jane Knowles 
 Matt - Brian Hewlett 
 Captain Davey Warbeck - Godfrey Kenton 
 Emily - Joan Hart 
 Tony Kroesig - Michael Spice 
 Lord Merlin - John Rye 
 Bessie - Olwen Griffiths 
 Mrs Fletcher - Barbara Mitchell 
 The Bolter - Cecile Chevreau 
 Other parts played by Sion Probert, George Raistrick, Alan Rowe and William Sleigh. 
 Adapted by Alan Melville. Produced by Norman Wright. 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 23 February 1974 
 
 Love in a Cold Climate 
 A glamorous invitation to a grand party at Hampton - home of the fantastically rich Montdores and their beautiful daughter Polly - brings Fanny into the world of 1920s high society: and in and out of love when the temperature drops... Amanda Root stars in this sparkling sequel to The Pursuit of Love. 
 
Cast 
 Fanny - Amanda Root 
 Lady Montdore - Barbara Jefford 
 Polly - Teresa Gallagher 
 Veronica - Jenny Howe 
 Uncle Davey - Jon Strickland 
 Aunt Emily - Patience Tomlinson 
 Aunt Sadie - Tessa Worsley 
 Uncle Matthew - Ioan Meredith 
 Boy Dougdale - Stephen Critchlow 
 Jassy - Sarah-Jane Holm 
 Victoria - Tilly Gaunt 
 Cedric - William Hope 
 Alfred - Tom Beard 
 Dramatised by Claire Luckham. Directed by Marion Nancarrow. 
 First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 3 May 1999 
 
 The King's Favourite 
 Based on Mitford's Madame de Pompadour, this three-part drama vividly evokes the colourful atmosphere of 18th Century Versailles, and Louis XV's tempestuous relationship with his adored mistress, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour. 
 
Cast 
 Narrator - Alan Melville 
 Duc d'Orléans - Patrick Tull 
 Madame de Ventadour - Katherine Parr 
 Infanta Maria of Spain - Elizabeth Proud 
 Louis XV (as a youth) - Nigel Anthony 
 Duc de Bourbon - James Thomason 
 The Queen - Pauline Letts 
 Louis XV - Edward de Souza 
 Lebel, concierge - Robin Browne 
 Marquise de la Ferté - Margot Boyd 
 Monsieur Poisson - Harold Kasket 
 Madame d'Etioles - Moira Lister 
 Monsieur d'Etioles - John Gabriel 
 Lasmartre, a huntsman - David Timson 
 Lady of the Court - Olwen Griffiths 
 Produced by Norman Wright. 
 First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 10-24 December 1971 
 
 Dearest Evelyn, Darling Nancy 
 Adapted from the witty correspondence of lifelong literary friends Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, this entertaining, gossipy 'conversation in letters' stars Timothy West and Prunella Scales. 
 
Cast 
Evelyn Waugh - Timothy West 
 Nancy Mitford - Prunella Scales 
 Adapted by Alan Bell. Produced by Pete Atkin. 
 First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 30 December 1993 
 
 Greatest Lives - Nancy Mitford 
 Grace Dent loves Nancy Mitford for her wit, and for the way in which she showed women that it was possible to live your life fully and unconventionally. Matthew Parris asks what it is about Nancy that so inspires Grace, with the aid of Mitford biographer Lisa Hilton. 
 Produced by Beth O'Dea. 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 22 January 2013 
 
© 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Nancy Mitford: Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate & More

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast drama collection

Evelyn Waugh

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Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, who matched wits and traded literary advice in more than five hundred letters over twenty-two years. Dissecting their friends, criticizing each other's books and concealing their true feelings beneath a barrage of hilarious and knowing repartee, they found it far easier to conduct a friendship on paper than in person. This correspondence provides a colourful glimpse into the literary and social circles of London and Paris, during the Second World War and for twenty years after.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

This gossipy account of Louis XIV is a clear and fascinating historical biography from Nancy Mitford. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY STELLA TILLYARD 
 
During his reign Louis XIV was the most powerful king in Europe. He presided over a golden age of military and artistic achievement in France, and deployed his charm and talents for spin and intrigue to hold his court and country within his absolute control. The Sun King's universe centred on Versailles, a glittering palace from where Louis conducted his government and complex love affairs. Nancy Mitford describes the daily life of this splendid court in sumptuous detail, recreating the past in vivid colour.

The Sun King

In one of the wittiest novels of them all, Nancy Mitford casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class. Set in the privileged world of the county house party and the London season, this is a comedy of English manners between the wars by one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of the language.

The Pursuit of Love

With Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing

Love in a Cold Climate

Eugenia Malmains is one of the richest girls in England and an ardent supporter of Captain Jack and the Union Jackshirts; Noel and Jasper are both in search of an heiress (so much easier than trying to work for the money); Poppy and Marjorie are nursing lovelorn hearts; and the beautiful bourgeois Mrs Lace is on the prowl for someone to lighten the boredom of her life. They all congregate near Eugenia's fabulous country home at Chalford, and much farce ensues. 
 
One of Nancy Mitford's earliest novels, Wigs on the Green has been out of print for nearly seventy-five years. Nancy's sisters Unity and Diana were furious with her for making fun of Diana's husband, Oswald Mosley, and his politics, and the book caused a rift between them all that endured for years. Nancy Mitford skewers her family and their beliefs with her customary jewelled barbs, but there is froth, comedy and heart here too.

Wigs on the Green

When Jeanne-Antoinette was nine, she was told by a fortune teller that she would one day become the mistress of the handsome young Louix XV - from that day she was groomed to become 'a morsel fit for a King'. Nancy Mitford lovingly tells the story of how the little girl rose, against a backdrop of savage social-climbing, intrigue, excess and high drama, to become the most powerful women of the eighteenth century French court, Le Pompadour.

Madame de Pompadour

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KATE WILLIAMS 
 
Frederick II of Prussia attempted to escape his authoritarian father as a boy, but went on to become one of history's greatest rulers. He loved the flute, and devoted hours of study to the arts and French literature, forming a long-lasting but turbulent friendship with Voltaire. He was a military genius and enlarged the borders of his empire, but he also promoted religious tolerance, economic reform and laid the foundation for a united Germany. Nancy Mitford brings all these contradictions and achievements to sparkling life in an fascinating, intimate biography.

Frederick the Great

Nancy Mitford modelled the characters in her best-known novels on her own unconventional (and at the time of writing, notorious) family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin, Fanny ('the Bolter's girl'), on one of her frequent visits to their country estate: Uncle Matthew the blustering patriarch, owner of that bloodied entrenching tool above the fireplace, who hunts his children with bloodhounds; vague Aunt Sadie, and six children recklessly eager to grow up. 
 The Pursuit of Love is the story of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward of the Radlett daughters, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist (whom she follows to the Spanish Civil War), and finally a very wicked and irresistibly charming French duke. 
 Love in a Cold Climate, again related by Fanny, focuses on Polly Hampton, long groomed for the perfect marriage by her fearsome mother, Lady Montdore, but secretly determined to pursue her own course.

Love in a Cold Climate & The Pursuit of Love

In print together, in one volume, are ALL eight of Nancy Mitford's sparklingly astute, hilarious and completely unputdownable novels. 
 
Published over a period of 30 years, they provide a wonderful glimpse of the bright young things of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties in the city and in the shires; firmly ensconced at home or making a go of it abroad; and what the upper classes really got up to in peace and in war.

The Complete Novels

'I believe it would have been normal for me to have paid a visit to the outgoing ambassadress. However, the said ambassadress had set up such an uninhibited wail when she knew she was to leave, proclaiming her misery to all and sundry and refusing so furiously to look on the bright side, that is was felt she might not be very nice to me.' 
 
Fanny is married to absent-minded Oxford don Alfred and content with her role as a plain, tweedy housewife with 'ghastly' clothes. But overnight her life changes when Alfred is appointed English Ambassador to Paris. In the blink of an eye Fanny's mixing with Royalty, Rothschilds and Dior-clad wives, throwing cocktail parties and having every indiscreet remark printed in tomorrow's papers. 
 
But with the love lives of her new friends to organize, an aristocratic squatter who won't budge and the antics of her maverick sons to thwart, Fanny's far too busy to worry about the diplomatic crisis looming on the horizon . . . 
 
Don't Tell Alfred continues the hilarious stories of characters Nancy Mitford introduced in The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing.

Don't Tell Alfred

The wickedly funny sequel to The Pursuit of Love

The meeting of Voltaire, successful financier, famous poet and troublemaker, and the enchanting amateur physicist and countess Émilie du Châtelet, was a meeting of both hearts and minds. In the Château de Cirey, the two brilliant intellects scandalised the French aristocracy with their passionate love affair and provoked revolutions both political and scientific with their groundbreaking work in literature, philosophy and physics. 
Nancy Mitford's account of the love affair of the Enlightenment is, in the author's own words, 'a shriek from beginning to end'.

Voltaire in Love

Nancy Mitford's first novel, a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle, where bright young things play pranks on their stodgy elders until the frothy plot climaxes in ghost sightings and a dramatic fire. 
 
Inspired in part by Mitford's youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus, and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humour. 
Light-hearted and sparkling with witty banter, Highland Fling was Mitford's first foray into the delightful fictional world for which the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate later became so celebrated. 
 
'A delightful comedy of manners' - The Times

Highland Fling

The formidable fox-hunting obsessed Lady Bobbin has put together a Christmas house party at Compton Bobbin, including her rebellious daughter Philadelphia, the girl's pompous suitor, a couple of children obsessed with newspaper death notices, and an aspiring writer whose deadly (in more ways than one) serious first novel has been acclaimed as the funniest book of the year, to his utter dismay. And then there is beautiful ex courtesan Amabelle Fortescue and her group of guests staying in a nearby cottage ... As the house parties starts to unravel, so the jokes increase: this is Nancy Mitford's second novel and one of her earliest forays into the world of the Bright Young Things.

Christmas Pudding

Set at the outbreak of World War II, Lady Sophia Garfield dreams of becoming a beautiful spy but manages not to notice a nest of German agents right under her nose. Until the murder of her maid and the kidnapping of her beloved bulldog force them on her attention, with heroic and absurd results. 
 
One of Mitford's earliest novels and written before Christmas 1939, Pigeon Pie is delivered with a touch lighter than that of her later masterpieces but no less entertaining. This comedy combines glamour, wit, and a fiendishly absurd plot into an irresistible literary confection. 
 
'This sparking and deliciously acid commentary of the social world.' - The Scotsman

Pigeon Pie

'Obsessed with sex!' said Jassy, 'there's nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I'm a pygmalionist.' 
In the end we got far more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding. 
'Ducks can only copulate,' said Linda, after studying this for a while, 'in running water. Good luck to them.' 
 
Oh the tedium of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the look out for the perfect lover. But finding Mr Right is much harder than any of the sisters thought. Linda must suffer marriage first to a stuffy Tory MP and then to a handsome and humorousless communist before finding real love in war-torn Paris . . . 
 
The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest, sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written.

Now a major series on BBC and Prime Video directed by Emily Mortimer and starring Lily James and Andrew Scott

'How lovely - green velvet and silver. I call that a dream, so soft and delicious, too.' She rubbed a fold of the skirt against her cheek. 'Mine's silver lamé, it smells like a bird cage when it gets hot but I do love it. Aren't you thankful evening skirts are long again?' 
 
Ah, the dresses! But oh, the monotony of the Season, with its endless run of glittering balls. Even fabulously fashionable Polly Hampton - with her startling good looks and excellent social connections - is beginning to wilt under the glare. 
 
Groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, fearsome Lady Montdore, Polly instead scandalizes society by declaring her love for her uncle 'Boy' Dougdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, and promptly eloping to France. But the consequences of this union no one could quite expect . . . 
 
Love in a Cold Climate is the wickedly funny follow-up to The Pursuit of Love and explores the mystery of sexual attraction.

Grace and her young son Sigi are finally able to join her dashing aristocratic husband Charles-Edouard in France after the war. But Grace is out of her depth among the fashionably dressed and immaculately coiffured French women, and shocked by their relentless gossiping and bedhopping. When she discovers her husband's tendency to lust after every pretty girl he sees, it looks like trouble. And things get even more complicated when little Sigi steps in . . . 
 
The Blessing is a hilarious tale of love, fidelity, and the English abroad, tailored as brilliantly as a New Look Dior suit.

The Blessing

With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction. 
 
The Pursuit of Love, a Level 5 Reader, is B1 in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing present perfect continuous, past perfect, reported speech and second conditional. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear regularly. 
 
The Pursuit of Love is about the love adventures of Fanny Logan's cousin, Linda Radlett, who is beautiful, brave and fun. Linda finally finds love and seems happy, but this is the 1930s and her country will soon go to war with Germany. What will happen to Linda then?

Penguin Readers Level 5: The Pursuit of Love (ELT Graded Reader)

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