The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford is a great book. After I finished reading it, I was just in awe: she wrote with such ease and flow, and with humor as well as acute humanity. In The Pursuit of Love, Mitford presented the world of England between the two world wars, and within that world the life of an eccentric family and the friendship between two cousins, the narrator Fanny and the beautiful and electric Linda. Modernity hovered in the forms of dance and dress and new political ideas, but traditions hung on, especially in the older country homes of the gentry. Rebellion took the form of sex (Fanny’s mother, called “the Bolter” for the many times she has loved and left a man), and of love pursued beyond the acceptable bounds of class, religion, or nation (Linda’s romantic quest).
Pursuing love is almost always a rebellion of some sort, against common sense or family or tradition: it is an effort to identify your own self through loving, and being loved by, another person. Sure of her family’s adoration but bored by its limits, Linda rebels. Fanny, deserted by her own parents and yet sure of who she is (and who she is not: her mother) doesn’t. They both find love, but Linda’s path is rocky, tough, and long; Fanny’s, level and smooth.
Mitford wrote this novel with a very sure voice, creating a rhythm of real life passing before us, the old England soon to fade under the onslaught of WWII and its aftermath. Fanny’s voice drew me in immediately, as she described in the very first paragraph the tea room of her family’s old estate, decorated with “an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915 Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans….it is still covered by blood and hairs, an object of fascination for us children.“ And so we are introduced to this family with high emotions, old-fashioned ideals, and admirable survival skills. The children were left largely on their own to figure out many basics, like the facts of life, and used whatever information was available, including a book on breeding ducks: “Ducks can only copulate …in running water. Good luck to them.”
Fanny and Linda cope with adolescence on their own, trying to figure out make-up using the paint set of a younger sister and escaping off to London for a forbidden luncheon, “looking at ourselves in every shop window that we passed. (I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their hand looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be.”) Mitford’s words convey a perfect and very real adolescent moment, revisited through older, wiser, and sympathetic eyes. The adventure ends in discovery but Linda’s first love affair has been launched: success. Love affair and marriage follows love and marriage, but happiness remains elusive for Linda, reachable for Fanny. Linda does find love, unconventionally-so for her family’s standards but then the war begins. The women of the family are together again under one roof, struggling with rations and economies and fear of, as well as determination to face bravely, whatever comes. The war concludes, there is loss (“a light went out, a great deal of joy that could not be replaced“: my heart ached at the words) but babies are born as well, tomorrow still coming.
This is a beautiful and perfectly wrought novel. It was a joy to read, from start to finish; it was moving, and funny, and just lovely in its depiction of very real people in a very distinct period of time, experiencing the universal and timeless quest for love. In the end Linda found “the great love of her life“: Mitford ends with the Bolter’s response, “One always thinks that. Every, every time.” Of course we do; if we did not, it would not be love we were pursuing; and not its capture, finally, that we celebrate.
