Book description
Nancy Mitford was witty, intelligent, often acerbic, a great tease
and an acute observer of upper-class English idiosyncrasies. With the
publication of her novels, above all The Pursuit of Love, Love in a
Cold Climate and The Blessing, she became a huge
bestseller and a household name.
An inspired letter writer, she wrote almost daily to a wide variety
of correspondents, among them Evelyn Waugh, Harold Action, John
Betjeman, Lord Berners, Lady Seafield, and, of course, her sisters.
Selina Hastings captures equally the gaiety and frivolity and the
unhappy truth of Nancy Mitford's life: her failed marriage and her
long, unfulfilled relationship with 'the Colonel' contrasting sharply
with literary celebrity and glittering social success. Selina Hastings
has written a biography that is superbly entertaining and clear-eyed,
of a life that Diana Mosley spoke of as being 'so sad one can hardly
bear to contemplate it'.
Selina Hastings is a writer and literary journalist. She worked for
fourteen years on the
Daily Telegraph
and subsequently as literary editor of
Harper's & Queen
. She has also written
Evelyn Waugh: A Biography.
