Nancy Mitford
"Selina Hastings has written a book which Nancy Mitford would have been
proud to write herself." - A.N. Wilson
An Extract
“When Linda, penniless, sinks down on her suitcase in the Gare du Nord and bursts into tears, she know that nothing so dreadful has ever happened to her before, and that her predicament is hopeless. Then, through her weeping, she becomes aware of somebody standing beside her: a short, stocky Frenchman in a black Homburg hat. And so begins the great love affair of Linda’s life, a love which transforms her existence, breaking her free from the dark and dreary confines of her English past to release her into perfect happiness in Paris, the most beautiful city on earth.
This is how Nancy Mitford tells the story in The Pursuit of Love. A novelist who always wrote with a strong element of autobiography, nowhere does she come closer to the truths of her own life. As it was for Linda, her life, too, was transformed by a short, stocky Frenchman in a black Homburg hat, whom she met not in the Gare du Nord, but in the garden of the Allies’ club in Park Lane. Like Linda, she found in beautiful Paris happiness and freedom of spirit; a freedom, too, from a failed marriage, following years of frustration passed under the iron régime of a tyrannical father.
Both Nancy’s parents were the children of remarkable men, and in both cases the remarkable qualities of their fathers passed the entirely by, to reappear again, at full strength and in a number of strange permutations, in the succeeding generation…” (Nancy Mitford)
