Nancy Mitford

The snobbery and false values of the English country nobility are satirized in these two love stories involving the well-established Radlett and Hampton families.

& Love in a Cold Climate : Two Novels

The Pursuit of Love

Obsessed with sex!' said Jassy, 'there's nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I'm a pygmalionist.' In the end we got far more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding. 'Ducks can only copulate,' said Linda, after studying this for a while, 'in running water. Good luck to them.' Oh, the tedium of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the look out for the perfect lover. But finding Mr Right is much harder than any of the sisters had thought. Linda must suffer marriage first to a stuffy Tory MP and then to a handsome and humourless communist, before finding real love in war-torn Paris . . . The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest and sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written.

Penguin Essentials The

Pursuit of Love

Sarah Christine Gill

Every time I re-read this I forget to look up the french bits. 

Anyway, one of my go-to comfort reads. Never fails to cheer me up.

Sarah Escorsa

Well this turned out to be quite a disappointment. I had no idea what to expect when I first started reading The Pursuit of Love but I did expect to be entertained, which I wasn't. I struggled through the first chapters and when the pace finally started to pick up around chapter 7 I must admit I was no longer interested in the Radletts. The character of Linda I found least interesting of them all and I think I would have enjoyed the story more had it been centered on the narrator's character instead. 

Some reviews talk of the Radletts as an eccentric family and I'm wondering if I read the same book! There's nothing in the least eccentric about them and I also seemed to have missed the wit and humour of it all. To be honest, I just found the book quite boring. I was about to give it a one-star rating but finally settled on two because the book wasn't badly written. 

Unfortunately for me I also purchased the follow-up to this book, Love in a Cold Climate, and I can't say I look forward to reading it. Some readers seem to have enjoyed it more than The Pursuit of Love so I might give it a try one of these days.

taryn

I thought I would enjoy this way more than I did. It was fine, there are moments that are really great, but mostly it was just okay. It makes you question expectations of love throughout alongside the absurdity of aristocratic life.

Jade Flynn

Finally I've read a book that's marketed as funny and it actually is, loved the quick wit and English sarcasm dotted throughout. It made for a delightful read and I'll most definitely be reading another Mitford in the future.

A hardcover omnibus of the comic masterpieces that made Nancy Mitford famous: madcap tales of growing up among the privileged and eccentric in England and finding love in all the wrong places. Nancy Mitford modeled the characters in her two best-known novels on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, visiting their Gloucestershire estate. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children are recklessly eager to grow up. The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice. Love in a Cold Climate focuses on Polly Hampton, long groomed for the perfect marriage by her fearsome mother, Lady Montdore, but secretly determined to find her own path. Together these hilarious novels vividly evoke the lost glamour of aristocratic life in England between the wars.

The Pursuit of Love; Love in a Cold Climate

Linn Jukri

2.75

This book was not like a block of wood. Rather, it made me feel like a block of wood

Ok to clarify, there wasn't really anything wrong with this book. Really. It just didn't really make me feel anything. I have no hard feelings for this book, I just have no emotions about it at all.

Still deciding what I think. In general I thought it was a fun, silly satire with some excellent (especially secondary) characters though ultimately it is kind of depressing? 

The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate : Two Novels

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