The genius of Nancy Mitford

Nancy, the first – and perhaps most famous – of the six Mitford girls, died half-a-century ago on 30 June. The lives of the Mitford sisters seem as remote today as Jane Austen’s Bennett sisters. It is almost impossible to separate the family from their fictional equivalents. The books that made them so, Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, have become classics, still in print today, creating cult figures of her already notorious family.

The intensely autobiographical nature of her fiction might suggest a lack of creative imagination but the real-life models she was so brilliantly able to draw on – with little embellishment – made it all the more fascinating for appearing to be true. Published in December 1945, The Pursuit of Love, an hilarious, high-spirited and sweepingly romantic tale came at just the right time to a country exhausted and numb after six years of war.