NANCY MITFORD
(aka Linda Radlett, played by Lily James)
Nancy’s own quest for love was even more tragic than that of her alter ego Linda Radlett. As a naive 23-year-old, Nancy fell in love with Hamish St Clair-Erskine, second son of the Earl of Rosslyn. Hamish was a society butterfly, amusing, vain and, crucially, gay. Nancy’s brother Tom had had a brief schoolboy dalliance with Hamish at Eton, and warned Nancy that the relationship was doomed to fail. After five years of unrequited love and a heartless ‘engagement’, Hamish brutally broke it off, pretending he’d decided to marry someone else.
Less than a month later, Nancy accepted a rash proposal from Peter Rodd, the son of diplomat Lord Rennell. According to a friend, Rodd had been proposing to girls all over town as a joke and Nancy had been foolish enough to take him seriously. Nancy’s sister Debo said Rodd
‘lacked the backbone that would make anyone a husband’. He was a waster, and within a year of their wedding he was having an affair and gambling away Nancy’s money.
She used Peter, or ‘Prod’ as he was known to the family, as the inspiration for both of Linda Radlett’s husbands. Like her first husband
Tony, he was a ‘crasher’ (Mitford speak for a terrible bore) with a pompous family. And like Linda’s second, Christian, he was indifferent to his wife’s unhappiness, dragging her off to southern France to help refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
Nancy and Prod lived increasingly separate lives. She had an affair with an officer in the Free French Forces and suffered an ectopic pregnancy which left her unable to have children. Shortly afterwards she met the man she thought of as the love of her life – Gaston Palewski, then head of de Gaulle’s cabinet in exile, who she immortalised in The Pursuit Of Love as Fabrice de Sauveterre. In the book, Fabrice worships Linda, but in reality, Gaston never loved Nancy. Their relationship continued for decades, but he never offered to formalise it. Instead, when she discovered she had cancer at 64, he told her he was leaving her for a richer, younger woman.