Radlett and Montdore

4 primary works

The Pursuit of Love

by Nancy Mitford

Published 29 April 1976

Childhood at Alconleigh is scanty preparation for the realities of the outside world and Linda, sweetest and most aimless of the young Radletts, falls prey to a stuffy banker and a rabid communist before she finds her ideal in a Frenchman . . .

The Pursuit of Love (Television Tie-in)

by Nancy Mitford and Nancy Miford

Published 27 July 2021

This madcap masterpiece about growing up among the privileged and eccentric in England and finding love in all the wrong places is now the basis for a star-studded television series.
 

Nancy Mitford modeled the characters in her best-known novel 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. Her hilarious adventures vividly evoke the lost glamour of aristocratic life in England between the wars.
 

Love in a Cold Climate

by Nancy Mitford

Published 29 April 1976

In one of the wittiest novels of them all, Nancy Mitford casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class. Set in the privileged world of the county house party and the London season, the story of coldly beautiful Polly Hampton and her aristocratic parents is a comedy of English manners between the wars by one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of the language.

Don't Tell Alfred

by Nancy Mitford

Published 29 April 1976

This brilliantly funny novel revisits some of the characters from Nancy Mitford's earlier stories including Fanny, who is married to bumbling, absent-minded Oxford don, Alfred. Fanny is content in her role as a tweedy housewife with 'ghastly' clothes, but her life changes overnight when Alfred is appointed English Ambassador to Paris. Suddenly she is mixing with royalty and Rothschilds, hosting cocktail parties and having details of her every move and outfit printed in the papers. As if that wasn't all more than enough to contend with, she also finds herself dealing with an aristocratic squatter, organising her friends' love lives and keeping track of her maverick sons. All she needs now is a diplomatic crisis...