Today would be Nancy Mitford’s 108th birthday. Born on November 28 1904, she was the oldest of the six famous sisters, a member of 1920s high society, and an English novelist, known for titles such as Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.
Nancy shared many of the foibles of her characters. After a five year relationship with a homosexual Scottish aristocrat, she married the Hon. Peter Murray Rennell Rodd. The marriage was a failure; her husband was unfaithful and couldn’t keep a job. She later fell in love with Colonel Gaston Palewski, Chief of Staff to Charles de Gaulle, and following the war, moved to Paris to be closer to him. The largely one-sided affair, which inspired the romance between Linda Talbot and Fabrice de Sauveterre in Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love, lasted until Palewski’s affair with and eventual 1969 marriage to Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord, the Duchesse de Sagan. She remained in France for the rest of her life.
She died in Versailles in 1973 and is buried alongside three of her sisters in Oxfordshire.
Here is one of my favourite quotes from The Pursuit of Love, describing one woman’s troubled search for the one: “Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can’t imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him.”
