Literary Christmas: Nancy Mitford

For our final Literary Christmas post of Blogmas 2024 (the 24th will be a different festive bookish post!), we are turning to one of my favourite authors. We started with Elizabeth Gaskell, peeked at Edith Wharton’s spooky Christmas, and learned from Hans Christian Andersen’s sad Christmas. And with that journey we have seen a real range in approaching Christmas in fiction. Today, we are exploring Christmas in Nancy Mitford’s novels, a mid-twentieth century country house Christmas. While we have several on-screen adaptations, I want to go back to the sources. Onto Literary Christmas: Nancy Mitford!

Christmas Pudding

Christmas Pudding is a 1932 novel where a group of Bright Young Things find themselves at a country home after an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease ruins their hunting plans.

Here is where I admit- I’ve not read this yet! I’m actually saving it for this week to get me through the last week of work before the holidays, so will have an update for here soon. (Work is incredibly stressful, so I’m hoping having a book to look forward to will help.)

Christmas in The Pursuit of Love

The Pursuit of Love remains Mitford’s best known novel, and it has one of the most entertaining descriptions of Christmas that I’ve read. Mitford’s upper-class world is fairly foreign for most of us and Downton Abbey… this is not. The novel essentially opens with Fanny (the narrator) describing Christmas with her cousins, the Radletts. And I don’t know if I’ve read a more darkly humorous explanation of the holidays.

When a child I spent my Christmas holidays at Alconleigh, it was a regular feature of my life, and, while some of them slipped by with nothing much to remember, others were distinguished by violent occurrences and had a definite character of their own. There was the time, for example, when the servants wing caught fire, the time when my pony lay on me in the brook and nearly drowned me…

There was the unforgettable holiday when Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie went to Canada. The Radlett children would rush for the newspapers every day hoping to see that their parents’ ship had gone down with all aboard; they yearned to be total orphans… The ship met with no iceberg and weathered the Atlantic storms, but meanwhile we had a wonderful holiday, free from rules. (Pursuit, Chapter 1)

photograph of Nancy Mitford — By Unidentified photographer for Bassano Ltd – one or more third parties have made copyright claims against Wikimedia Commons in relation to the work from which this is sourced or a purely mechanical reproduction thereof. This may be due to recognition of the “sweat of the brow” doctrine, allowing works to be eligible for protection through skill and labour, and not purely by originality as is the case in the United States (where this website is hosted). These claims may or may not be valid in all jurisdictions.As such, use of this image in the jurisdiction of the claimant or other countries may be regarded as copyright infringement. Please see Commons:When to use the PD-Art tag for more information., Public Domain, Link

Have you read The Pursuit of Love?

Cheers,
The Historian
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Literary Christmas: Nancy Mitford