Debutantes are gone, the class divide remains: How life has changed since Nancy Mitford's pursuit of love

Telegraph

a day ago

Eighty years ago, Nancy Mitford became an overnight success with the publication of The Pursuit of Love, a novel that chronicles the lovely Linda Radlett's pursuit of – well – love. From teenage daydreams to runaway romances, Linda's marriages and affairs, utterly scandalous within their 1930s context, today read as blissfully relatable to the book's modern fans.
Considerably less relatable, if not just as consumable, is the upper-class world Linda exists within. The semi-autobiographical novel features the Radletts and friends in a behind-the-veil depiction of interwar English aristocracy that presents Nancy's ruling class as gilded and gorgeous, but also shameless snobs.
Nancy drew from her own family for a portrayal of siblings not just privileged, but utterly bonkers. 'Whenever I read the words 'Peer's Daughter' in a headline, I know it's going to be something about one of you children,' Lady Redesdale, the Mitford matriarch, bemoaned.
For the uninitiated, their life sounds unbelievable. Diana, the eldest, divorced the Guinness heir for Oswald Mosley; right on her heels, Jessica ran away to the Spanish Civil War; no one is quite sure whether or not Unity was pregnant with Hitler's baby when she put a gun to her head in 1939. (In a Daily Mail poll a year later, the unimpressed British public voted Unity Mitford the 14th most annoying thing about the war.)
The novel became a near-immediate bestseller. Then, a decade later, Nancy cemented her reputation as Britain's foremost social commentator with the essay The English Aristocracy, which sought to further define the terms U (upper class) and Non-U (middle and lower class), first coined by linguist Alan S C Ross.
So it's no wonder we are still obsessed by Nancy and her family to this day. This week, Outrageous, based upon Mary Lovell's excellent biography of the siblings, premieres on June 19 on U and U&Drama. It stars Bessie Carter as Nancy, with Anna Chancellor and James Purefoy as Muv and Farve, the Mitford parents.
In an age of royal family dramas and Made in Chelsea influencers, our interest in what upstairs gets up to behind the scenes shows no signs of waning. But 80 years on, just how much are we still living in Nancy's world – and what has changed?
Are we still pursuing love?
From crushes on celebrities – including the Prince of Wales – to sneaking out from their parents' home to go partying with students, Nancy's heroines enjoy rather familiar girlhood experiences.
Yet flirting on hunts and at debutante balls we (generally) are not; in 1958 Elizabeth II decreed that debs were no longer to be presented at court at the start of the social Season: the final 1,400 girls curtseyed to her that year.
Coming out now has a totally different meaning while as relationship therapist Anne Power says, we now find romance online on apps like Hinge, Tinder or Bumble.
But 'swiping on an app may not be so different,' she adds. 'The essential task for the individual, but still particularly that of the woman, in the courtship market is to make themselves 'look good'. In 1945 that was perhaps even more down to make-up and manners, but I'm not sure the dial has shifted so far.'
And some things don't change at all – handsy 'debs' delights' were labelled NSIT (Not safe in taxis) or MSC (Makes Skin Creep).
Negotiating the marriage market
For women of the Mitford era, the marriage market was a way to escape the strict clutches of their parents. In the novel, Linda's first husband is pretty much the first man she meets her age. Should Linda have lived today, her first marriage would have been a mere freshers' week relationship between two posh people in halls which didn't make it past second year.
With classic Mitford wit, Nancy wrote that one should 'marry for love… it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience' and then 'later on', one should marry for money. 'Big money,' she helpfully clarified.
In the years following the war, life began to imitate Nancy's art: women were getting married younger, and by 1970 the average age for first marriage for a female was 23.
Today it is entirely different for young women, with the average age of first marriage in their early 30s. 'None of us are desperately looking for love, nor do we see singlehood as some sort of waiting room, or a state of being that warrants pity,' dating columnist and author of Millennial Love, Olivia Petter, tells me.
Corridor creeping in country houses
Affairs, mistresses, second husbands; even by 21st-century standards, the marital lives of the Mitford sisters are delightfully scandalous. Diana Mitford, Queen of the Bright Young Things scene, led the charge by leaving her husband Bryan Guinness and their two young children to be the mistress, and eventually wife, of Mosley.
Nancy herself was no stranger to scandal. Her first engagement was to a gay man, and her subsequent marriage was to a money squandering womaniser.
In The Pursuit of Love, the narrator's mother is infamously labelled The Bolter, and enjoys life in Kenya while her daughter is brought up by her aunt. The character was inspired by Lady Idina Sackville, Frances Osborne's great-grandmother, who married five times – an early serial monogamist, perhaps.
Today, of course, matters regarding marriage and parenting have evolved. 'We would still not think well of a mother (or father) who walks away from their child, very occasionally dropping back in with lavish presents,' Power says of The Bolter.
While the upper classes may still be corridor creeping to chilly bedrooms at country house weekends, our attitudes to infidelity have remained fairly steadfast, despite the advent of the Pill in the 1960s. Perhaps what has changed is that it's no longer viewed as simply a male pursuit.
Parenting power
And there are other ways in which parenting has changed: the Uncle Matthew of the novel is definitely outdated. 'We're not as in love with hierarchy,' Power says, highlighting the absolute authority parents assumed to hold over their children in Nancy's Britain. Yet there is a level of sympathy that should be granted to the parental figures of The Pursuit of Love. Whether right or wrong by today's standards, parents of Nancy's time 'wanted what's best for their child'. Today, we know children should be hugged and not hit: corporal punishment in schools was outlawed in 1986, although the law on smacking is less clear in England than it is in Scotland and Wales.
But similar micromanagement prevails, Power explains: 'After school clubs, preschool clubs. Why are parents doing this? To set their child on a certain track.'
An obsession with class
Nancy was a terrible snob about many things, and no group incurred her wrath more than the aspirational middle class. To Nancy, anything the middle classes seemed to do offended her upper-class sensibilities, whether they referred to Saturday and Sunday as the weekend, worked in offices or lived in Surrey. Going to school is middle class; usage of words such as 'notepaper' instead of 'writing-paper' is wrong; a tassel on an umbrella is common.
But it is the middle class's attitude to money that riled up Nancy the most. 'Fussing about with blokes' money all day indoors' was how Uncle Matthew described the Governor of the Bank of England, who instead thought life should be spent hunting, riding, and lounging in inherited manors. We can only imagine what he would make of what is the most noble profession for public school boys in 2025: a city banker.
What is considered posh or common may have changed over the years, but British commitment to class divide remains. Today, when EastEnders characters call each other darling and Prince William says mate, it's obvious we're no longer living in Nancy's world of strict U and Non-U vocabularies.
Instead, class indicators are nuanced details that subtly suggest membership to an inner world. On a recent shooting weekend, I was advised not to bring a Barbour jacket if it looked like I had recently bought it; a friend of mine, when asked, will call his Eton education 'a school near Ascot'.
War and peace
Like the Mitford sisters themselves, The Pursuit of Love is a novel very much shaped by the wars of the early 20th century. War even more than class is the basis of the Mitfords' legacy: the sisters may have well been banished to the forgotten corners of British aristocracy had they not been so stridently committed to their ideologies. Diana and Unity's love for Fascism – and in Unity's case, infatuation with Hitler himself – saw the former banished from both their upper-class scene and wider British society, and the latter eventually dying of the bullet still lodged in her head from her attempted suicide. Jessica the 'Red Sheep' eloped with her cousin who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and then moved to the United States, where she became active in the Communist Party.
I asked war historian Prof Dan Todman whether today's youth are as zealous. 'You've got to remember that, as good as their stories are, it was only a tiny minority who ventured to Spain to fight on either side,' he says. 'I think young people today are just as idealistic – it is one of the great virtues and benefits of youth – but they also face many of the same range of challenges in terms of whether and how that idealism can be expressed.'
Nancy herself avoided the era's political extremities. A dedicated patriot, she sided with country over family in real life; at the start of the Second World War, she reported Diana to the authorities as an 'extremely dangerous person'. With Diana locked up and Unity reduced to a childlike state, Nancy did her bit for the war effort by working at a first-aid post in London and volunteering to help Jewish families evacuated from the Blitz'ed out East End.
Todman is somewhat optimistic that the unity of wartime England championed by Nancy isn't totally lost, as the response to Covid-19 proved. But, 'it's easy to imagine we've lost an ability to put differences aside in pursuit of a shared goal. It's certainly harder to access,' he says, listing 'social media, political polarisation, divergent nationalisms in the UK and widening inequality' as reasons why. However, that's not to forget interwar Britain didn't have their own societal divides. 'There was widespread expectation of revolution or civil war,' Todman says. We may not be at that point yet, but according to some commentators, we're not far off.