Raven-haired and ravenous ... no wonder Lily’s a total cad magnet!
Outrageous love lives. Strong opinions. And a taste for scandal. As The Pursuit Of Love hits our TV screens, author JESSICA FELLOWES reveals...
ON his fine English estate, Lord Alconleigh (Dominic West) determines that his fine English daughters will never leave the family home, except to marry fine English gentlemen. ‘Church, stables, tennis courts,’ he roars, listing the facilities on offer. ‘Why would they ever want to leave?’
He wants his gels to rot in Alconleigh’s ivory towers, along with their threadbare sweaters and impoverished minds, until suitable marriages are made. Not to random cads or handsome swains (all ‘sewers’ according to him) but to husbands meeting his approval, preferably his dull chums from the House of Lords.
His favourite daughter Linda (Lily James) has other ideas. She is a wild and nervous creature, full of passion and longing, a total cad magnet.
‘I ache for life to be exciting,’ she says. Linda is a Leaver, not a Remainer.
Much has been made of the supposed real-life romance between the married West and the footloose James, which apparently blossomed on the set of this new three-part adaptation of the classic interwar novel by Nancy Mitford.
Yet little forbidden ardour leaks into their scenes together, not least because they are playing a father and a daughter – so let’s keep it legal.
Instead he roars around like a tweedy tornado, sporting a moustache that would be the envy of any walrus.
In grand rooms, chilled by paternal disapproval, he punishes Linda for her defiance, while she rebels against his bullying strictures – yet loves him still. ‘He is frightening and I disapprove of him so. But in a way, he sets the bar for English manhood,’ she says. Indeed.
BUT who couldn’t fall in love with Lily in this glossy drama? Her Linda is irresistible, a champagne bubble of a girl, raven-haired and ravenous for romance – although sorely unprepared for its consequences.
Whether splashing about in her bath or riding to hounds in her jodhpurs, James captures the quicksilver, absurd flightiness of a character who blossoms into a woman who would have liked to think that she was ‘more than a little sin of the body’. Shall I say it again? Indeed.
Cousin Fanny (Emily Beecham) is the Bridget Jones of the hour; the dutiful chronicler, narrator and timorous Robin to Linda’s blazing Batman.
She is also an eternal disappointment to her Uncle Matthew (Lord Alconleigh) for not only has she been educated, she introduces his daughter to frightful Non-U words such as ‘mantelpiece’ and ‘notepaper’.
Little wonder that in a bid to make the adventures of these two over-privileged, husband-hunting aristos relatable to the terrifyingly stringent mores of modern audiences, this adaptation focuses on their bonds of female friendship, steadfast even under fire from incoming cads.
For this we have to thank Emily Mortimer, who directed, adapted and even played a role, starring as Fanny’s mother, aka The Bolter. She hums around like Mrs Merton in a fascinator, and even has a cigarette holder to illustrate her jazzy decadence. ‘Does the world really need another costume drama about posh people in a big house in England?’ she asked herself before work began on Mitford’s beloved masterpiece.
Obviously she decided that is exactly what we did need, despite the fact that this is the third time The Pursuit Of Love has been adapted for television.
To spice things up, Mortimer appears to have asked everyone to pitch their performances somewhere between feverish and total hysteric, then had a nervous rummage in the special effects box.
She has created a frothy adaptation with a modern sheen; complete with slo-mo sequences, freeze frames and a daring contemporary soundtrack featuring the likes of Iggy Pop and New Order.
In this, she borrows much from films such as The Favourite (which starred Olivia Colman as Queen Anne) and Sofia Coppola’s high concept version of Marie Antoinette, and even director Wes Anderson – but why not? Purists might disapprove, but here she manages to encapsulate much of the sly comedy of the novel, alongside the happiness and promise of youth that brims from its early pages.
In one scene, Uncle Matthew’s eyes bulge like golf balls (Non-U) when Linda waltzes with dashing
Tony Kroesig (Freddie Fox) who not only has a German name (‘Hun!’) but a quiff to boot. ‘Who is that sewer dancing with Linda?’ he bellows. All this makes us fret over the palpitating expectation of love held by these lovely young girls, ill equipped for the journey ahead.
THIS Pursuit is a delight for many reasons, not least because it just looks so gorgeous, glowing with colour and texture from the pink walls of the hotel dining room, to the bobbled wool on Linda’s Fair Isle sweater to the crepe paper party hats at Christmas, decorated with period perfect silver rickrack.
There are moments when an atmosphere of clotted camp almost overwhelms, but what do we expect from a family who live in a world of superlatives?
A high point is Andrew Scott playing Lord Merlin (‘ that depraved sewer’) in polka- dot pyjamas while dancing to T.Rex, or explaining to a perplexed Lady Radlett (Dolly Wells) why he dyes his pet pigeons pastel every year.
‘They love it. It makes them pretty for each other,’ he observes. As Linda and the pigeons might say, isn’t it lovely, being lovely us.
ALL the hype around the BBC’s sexy, much-trailed adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit Of love, which started last night, is surely understandable.
At times of crisis, we love a period drama — Downton Abbey, created and written by my uncle, Julian Fellowes, was born in the wake of the 2009 recession — and as a means of distracting the nation, you can’t get much better than lily James in skimpy silk underwear and Fleabag vicar Andrew Scott in lashings of tweed.
Yet the buzz about the show isn’t just because of the gorgeousness of the lead actors, or the romance of a plot that takes two young upper-class women from ancestral piles in Oxford to war-torn Paris via the Pyrenees at the height of the Spanish Civil War.
It’s also because of our enduring fascination with the Mitford sisters. Anything Mitford- related has a popularity and personality which seems to speak to, and provoke, each new generation as keenly as the last.
I’ve always found the Mitfords utterly fascinating. The six of them, and their overshadowed brother, were famous in their own lifetimes for their beauty and their sometimes outrageous beliefs, but they also generated a slew of headlines for their fashion sense and their choice of husbands and lovers — a bit like a bohemian version of the Kardashians.
Such is my intrigue, I’ve written four novels (in what will be a six-book crime series), each featuring one of the Mitford sisters. As each sister was so radically different, they are a brilliant means of investigating different aspects of the inter-war era, from politics to celebrity. More than that, despite the century that divides us, there are distinct and illuminating parallels between the lives of these women then and our own now.
The eldest, Nancy Mitford, who achieved independence through her writing, was a modern woman even in our understanding of the word.
She wasn’t brought up that way. like nearly all the women of her class before World War I, there was only one expectation: that she should marry as well as possible.
A successful husband was the closest a woman had to a successful career. There were exceptions, of course, but this was the general rule.
A great aunt of mine, Isie Stephenson — the inspiration for the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, as played by Maggie Smith — would be taken on walks by her French governess. At each shrub, the pair would pause and Isie would be expected to introduce a new topic of conversation. The idea was that if she went to a party, she would know how to talk to everyone, even those who had the social skills of a plant. This made her good marriage material.
B UT World War I, which killed so many young men of a single generation, meant such women were thrown on their own resources. Nancy tried to fulfil her parents’ expectations at first, with a five-year engagement to a man who was gay, before a too-quick marriage to an arrogant and pedantic bore, Peter Rodd.
unable to have children — she miscarried more than once — Nancy decided to live life on her own terms after her amicable separation from Peter when he returned from World War II. An early example of ‘ conscious uncoupling’, you could say.
Nancy began writing society columns and her first novel, Highland Fling, was published in 1931, but this and the next three that followed did not sell well. Her luck changed with the huge success of The Pursuit Of love in 1945 which gave her the means to move to Paris, where she beautifully furnished a small apartment.
With wonderful style, she dressed herself in Dior, sometimes carefully bought second-hand. (She confessed that fears of a penniless retirement were quickly forgotten in the face of a fabulous new dress.) Her long-term French lover, Gaston Palewski, was married and though I don’t think she ever saw this as ideal, she kept herself busy with a myriad of cultured and intelligent friends as well as her work. Nancy’s frequent letters to and from her sisters, as well as literary great Evelyn Waugh, kept her satirical wit honed.
Nancy, who died aged 68 in 1973, never lacked for company or beauty in her surroundings, which was what she wanted. She lived by herself, she argued with her sisters, she took lovers and always looked good on little money. It could be a plotline made for Fleabag.
Of Nancy’s five sisters, the least talked about is Pamela — but she also strikes me as a template for modern womanhood. like Nancy, she shrugged off society’s expectations — to marry and have no career — by becoming a dairy farm manager for her brother-inlaw, Bryan Guinness. Pamela was, it was said, never happier than when among her cows. She never had children but was married for a time, to a bisexual scientist called Derek Jackson, a complicated and difficult man. The last half of her life (she died in 1994 aged 86) was spent more happily in Gloucestershire with an Italian horsewoman as her constant companion. All of the Mitford girls seem to have preferred quite bullish men, similar to their father, lord Redesdale. Dominic West’s character in The Pursuit Of love, the eccentric shorttempered uncle Matthew, father of main character linda, is thought to be based on him. In the novel uncle Matthew beats his children, hunts them with his four magnificent bloodhounds, puts down their pets and neglects to give them any kind of formal education. And you thought you had Daddy issues?
The Mitfords’ mother, lady Redesdale, was often portrayed by Nancy as a cold and distant woman, with strange peccadillos such as refusing all medicines. She, too, forms the basis of a character — linda’s mother, Aunt Sadie, played by Dolly Wells.
The outsiders in the Mitford family were Diana and unity, who shared a fascination with fascism, which neither renounced, even after the full horrors of Hitler’s ambitions were laid bare.
Diana gave up all of society — she had been one of its darlings as a beautiful, newly married, rich young woman — when she left Bryan Guinness for Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British union of Fascists from 1932. unity was equally obsessed with Hitler, and attempted suicide on the outbreak of war between Germany and England, dying a few years later of complications.
Their younger sister Jessica was by contrast a Communist, who never saw her father again after eloping with her cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Churchill’s, and later living in the East End of london where her baby daughter died in a measles epidemic.
This tragedy prompted a move to America, where she remained; her second marriage was to a civil rights lawyer. Jessica also earned her own independence with considerable success as an investigative journalist and author. She died in 1996 aged 78. O NE might think that Deborah, who became the Duchess of Devonshire in 1950, was the most traditional of all of them. But when she married her husband, Andrew Cavendish, he was the second son of a duke and not expected to have much more than an Army career.
Instead, his brother was killed in the war and after the early death of his father, he and Deborah were transported to Chatsworth and the dukedom. The house was vast and practically in ruins after being used as a school during the war.
In spite of her husband’s alcoholism, ‘Debo’ came up with the idea of running a farm shop and turned the stately home into a going concern that continues to this day. You can book into one of their holiday cottages on the Chatsworth estate — and pretend to be a Mitford.
Not that it was all roses and pink champagne: she had seven children but four were either stillborn or lived for only a few hours.
In short, these women were modern in their pursuit of life — and love. They were no virtue signallers but were campaigning activists. We may not always agree with them — they were not always the most likeable of people — but we can admire their tenacity and willingness to listen.
They were constant communicators, with each other and others. If they lived today, you can be certain they would be running highly popular social media accounts. But the important lesson modern audiences can take from them is that they continued to talk and to listen, even when they violently disagreed.
There is an agency and a freshness to their attitudes to life, particularly Nancy’s, with her determination to live life on her own terms, that keeps them relevant. She made it acceptable to be unmarried (although she did have her own version of Mr Big).
I can’t see the mythology of the Mitfords ever going away. Which is quite something for six women whose father forbade them from going to school in case it made them too unattractive to catch a husband. n The Pursuit Of Love is on BBC1 on Sundays at 9pm.