Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford 1904-73, English novelist and biographer, b. London. She managed a London bookshop during World War II and moved to Paris in 1945. Mitford and her six celebrated sisters were born into the British aristocracy, a class she satirizes in her novels, notably In Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949). Her writing is sophisticated, malicious, and captivating. Indeed, her boring, bigoted, illiterate lords and amoral, irresponsible ladies have taken on the qualities of myth. She also wrote biographies of Madame de Pompadour (1954) and Frederick the Great (1970).

Bibliography: See her letters (1993); C. Mosley, ed., The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters (2007) and correspondence with E. Waugh (1997); memoir by H. Acton (1976); biography by S. Hastings (1986).

Mitford's sister Jessica Mitford, 1917-96, b. Gloucestershire, England, also a writer, is known for her witty and irreverent polemics. Her works include The American Way of Death (1963; rev. ed. 1998), a scathing exposé of American funeral homes; Kind and Usual Punishment (1973), a critical study of the brutality of American prisons; and The American Way of Birth (1992), an indictment of the overuse of cesarean sections .

Bibliography: See her autobiography (1960, repr. 1981, 2004) and her memoirs of her early days as a Communist (1977); P. Y. Sussman, ed., Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (2006); see also J. Guinness, House of Mitford (1984), and M. S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (2002).

Mitford, Nancy (Freeman) (1904–73), writer, daughter of the second Lord Redesdale, who appears in many of her novels as the eccentric ‘Uncle Matthew’. She achieved success with The Pursuit of Love (1945), in which the sensible Fanny, daughter of the irresponsible Bolter, describes the affairs of her six Radlett cousins. Subsequent works (Love in a Cold Climate, 1949; The Blessing, 1951; Don't Tell Alfred, 1960) accompany the family and its associates through various social and amatory trials and triumphs; the appeal of the novels lies in the reckless upper-class Bohemianism of many of the characters, and in Nancy Mitford's sharp ear for dialogue. Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956, with A. S. C. Ross et al.), provoked a debate on ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ vocabulary, terms she herself promoted in Encounter (1955). She also wrote several historical biographies. Her sister Jessica Mitford (1917– ) has written a vivid account of Mitford family life, Hons and Rebels (1960).