Previously: Force-Ranking the Mitford Sisters.
Nancy Mitford (the ”direct link between…Wodehouse and Waugh”) is having a bit of a moment right now. With the re-release of Christmas Pudding, Pigeon Pie, and Highland Fling, it’s the first time in forty years that all eight of her novels have been available in print. The Toast caught a few minutes to chat with Jane Smiley, who wrote a definitive essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books reexamining Mitford’s literary and cultural legacy in 2011. (Full disclosure: I like Jessica the best of all the Mitfords, but if I were ever invited to a Mitford sister fancy-dress party, I would dress and act like Nancy all night until I had driven away every one of my friends.)
Smiley is more than pleased to see a renewed sense of interest in the “more revealing than perceptive Ms. Mitford.” Having written fewer than ten novels in her lifetime, Mitford was never “quite prolific enough to establish a huge [literary] presence,” Smiley points out. “It’s complex, what happens to female and male writers.” Like Dodie Smith or Stella Gibbons or Winifred Watson, Nancy’s work has typically been dismissed as light domestic satire or women’s fiction. Her literary reputation in particular has suffered in comparison to the nearly-insatiable public interest in Mitfordiana. “Let’s pretend that Nancy Mitford’s novels weren’t written by the famous Nancy Mitford,” Smiley wrote in her LARB essay, “but by some entirely obscure Mary Smith, who happened to be a middle-class daughter of a greengrocer, possessed of ambition, eloquence, and extraordinary powers of observation. If we did so, how would the novels hold up?”
Reader, they hold up marvelously well. The early ones – Christmas Pudding and Wigs on the Green in particular — don’t have the same timelessness as Love in a Cold Climate or her other postwar novels — but there’s a lovely sense of perspective and humor that runs through all of her work. “Humor is harder [to pull off] than tragedy,” says Smiley. “It’s so narrow; where tragedy is easy to telegraph.”
“Nancy thought a lot about love,” and she’s the kind of author you find yourself rooting for personally the more deeply you get to know her work. “Those who like her wish she had found it; you’d never know from her books that she didn’t.” Nancy’s books, in addition to being funny and skeptical and profoundly insightful, feature huge casts of characters, whom Nancy always treats extremely generously.
She “knew the world to come before it came,” Smiley says. “The world of divorce and split custody….The ’60s are right there” in Don’t Tell Alfred. Oddly enough, however, Nancy’s satirical, idiosyncratic style of writing was terribly out of fashion in the 1950s and 60s. Everything popular at the time was subjective and experimental, while Nancy remained “clear and objective” and maddeningly straightforward. Her clarity of narration and lively voice was a bit out of step at the time, but plenty of the styles that were deeply chic and avante-garde at the time are now archaic. It’s “the clear, objective writers like Austen who rise to the top over time.”
As for Nancy? “May she rise.”
Works Referenced
Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie (Indiebound | Amazon)
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate (Indiebound | Amazon)
Nancy Mitford, Wigs on the Green (Indiebound | Amazon)
Nancy Mitford, Highland Fling (Indiebound | Amazon)
Nancy Mitford, Don’t Tell Alfred (Indiebound | Amazon)
[Image via Stanford.edu]
Tags: books, jane smiley, nancy mitford
So, hypothetically, if one has somehow missed reading Mitford… where is the best place to start? Asking for a friend.
I think you can just jump in anywhere, but it might be good to start with The Pursuit of Love. It involves some of the same characters as Love In a Cold Climate but precedes it chronologically. Not that it really matters, since each book can stand alone.
I also want to know this.
Yes, I second starting with The Pursuit of Love. In addition to being first chronologically, it’s also my favorite one — it’s funnier and so well balanced. the father and his WW2 hacksaw or whatever mounted on the wall! and his outbursts! omg.
and then we should all go read J.R. Ackerley after that. My Dog Tulip and My Father and Myself (omg omg).
Interesting – Nancy is my favorite Mitford by a mile, but I’m not at all sure I agree that her novels are strong enough to stand up without her biography.
Of course, I think the same thing is true of most early 20th century novelists. (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Waugh . . .) But then, they’re writing at a particularly autobiographical novel moment.
I’ve got Smiley’s essay open in a tab, and am looking forward to it!
Yes, I second starting with The Pursuit of Love. In addition to being first chronologically, it's also my favorite one — it's funnier and so well balanced. the father and his WW2 hacksaw or whatever mounted on the wall! and his outbursts! omg.
and then we should all go read J.R. Ackerley after that. My Dog Tulip and My Father and Myself (omg omg).
Nancy hated Americans though. You can see it in all her letters, and someone I knew told me she met Nancy at a party long ago and as soon as NM heard her American accent she just walked off without a word.
I still love her writing. My own favorite is The Blessing, maybe because I live in France. It’s still SO TRUE and fun to read. When I first came to France I read all her books and then worked my way through all the Mitfordiana and her friends’ books. As you can see from the quotation I use on my website (upper left column)!
I’m also a big fan of Jane Smiley’s. I just made a young friend read The Greenlanders. Isn’t it true that in general, comedy or lighthearted things are considered less important or well-written (see: Academy Awards) even though over time, they often turn out to be classics, or at least far more readable than the heavy things. Anyone read Sinclair Lewis lately? But P.G. Wodehouse is still popular.
Thanks for this article!