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Telegraph
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
See a whole new side of the ‘fascist' Mitford sisters in this Outrageous TV drama
The title says it all: a TV drama about the Mitford sisters – based on Mary Lovell's definitive biography of the 1930s aristocratic brood – Outrageous is exactly that, the ne plus ultra of frothing family sagas that just happens to be true. With a cast including Bessie Carter, Joanna Vanderham, Anna Chancellor and James Purefoy, it's a tale of six siblings who, between them, turned interwar societal rebellion and scandal-mongering into a fine art. To take one example, on set just south of Oxford, deep in Mitford country, Toby Regbo – who plays Tom, the single Mitford brother, killed in Burma late in the war – and Diana (Vanderham) are discussing her forthcoming wedding… to one Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader. It is grim to hear Diana singing the praises and potential of the party her fiancé represents. But it is also grimly fascinating, and reminds me of one of Diana's most famous lines, written in a letter to her sister Deborah in 1985. 'I must admit,' she said, ''The Mitfords' would madden me if I didn't chance to be one. How ghastly [they] all sound…' That's the thing with any Mitford drama – see the word 'Mitford', and all kinds of ghastly preconceptions spring to mind. Yet, all of the sisters led remarkable lives (see right), and their stories keep resurfacing: it was only in January this year that they were in the headlines once again, with the discovery of youngest sibling Unity's diaries that revealed her relationship with Hitler, whom she idolised. But according to the Bafta-nominated The Long Song screenwriter Sarah Williams, who has adapted Lovell's biography for this new series, even what we know is not the half of it. 'I was really blown away by the true story,' she says, as we sit for lunch at The Duke of Monmouth pub, half an hour from Asthall Manor, where the Mitfords grew up. 'It seemed to me more dramatic, more exciting than Nancy's novels [both The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate contain fictionalised accounts of the family's lives]. I knew they were semi-autobiographical, but they were all done in a kind of jovial tone.' Williams wanted to remove that blithe spirit and get back to the facts, but when she first went to pitch to TV executives in 2005, she says that she encountered the same problem – people thought they already knew the family's story. 'I would say, 'No, you don't. The real story is so much more gripping.' But six women on a TV show was perhaps a harder nut to crack than it is now. I think everyone was a bit wary of it, saying, 'Hmm, they were all fascists, weren't they?'' Of course, the Mitfords weren't all fascists. 'That's the fascinating thing,' says Williams. 'They offer up such a broad, diverse picture of politics at the time.' It wasn't until Williams came up with the title that she says she started to believe her passion project might get greenlit. 'Outrageous: not a dry historical look at the 1930s, but something about a group of rebellious, transgressive women. And that felt commissionable.' The drama's tone is as punkish as the title demands, but its plot is still linear. It tells the Mitford story by focusing on each of the sisters in turn, giving all of them, their lives and their marriages, due screentime and context. Nancy, played by Bessie Carter (Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton's daughter), is the narrator, but that's because she is the primary writer of the group. 'Nancy wrote under her own name,' says Carter, speaking to me later in London, 'which at that time was pretty revolutionary. And yes, she was the eldest of this brood of six who were all incredibly different and unique. They all took very, very different paths, let's say!' Beginning in September 1931, the series is set in the shadow of the Wall Street Crash and charts the family's fortunes through the interwar period. It is a time of great unrest, old certainties crumbling and new forms emerging. Although it introduces the Mitfords at their country seat, it stresses how their aristocratic parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, were suffering financially. As the Depression cast a pall over the West and the spectre of fascism grew in its wake, the world was about to shift. And then, as Carter adds: 'On to that scene plunge these six rebellious, headstrong, passionate sisters who were very hungry to change the world in their own ways.' 'It kind of reminded me of Succession,' she continues. 'Although I know it's sacrilege to mention another show when you're talking about your own. It has that thing Succession captured brilliantly about a family dynamic being played out on a global scale. I'm an only child, but I think that sibling rivalry explains some of the Mitfords' thinking – if your sister is going to go that way, you're probably quite likely to head in the opposite direction.' It's a story of ideological divergence that was best told by Mary Lovell, the author of The Mitford Girls on which Outrageous is based. Lovell met four of the Mitfords researching her 2001 book and got to know 'Debo' (The Duchess of Devonshire) particularly well. She joins Williams and me at lunch. What, I ask, made this one family such a hotbed of scandal, like a better-educated, literary Kardashians? 'They just didn't recognise walls,' says Lovell, who points out that the Mitfords found a fierce intellectual independence from their home-schooling. They saw the world differently and acted accordingly. Lovell is 83 and terrific company. She has first-hand experience of the political fault lines that split the Mitford family just as they divided the world. 'I grew up during the war and I felt the fallout of what those sisters were arguing about,' she says. 'I mean, in the 1930s, there was a worldwide depression and so you had two possible solutions... or what they thought were solutions. One was fascism – and, don't forget, they had a very good model that fascism worked in what Hitler had done to Germany. We can forget about Hitler being the big bad wolf, because at the time he wasn't, he was just a politician with an extreme right-wing view.' At the other end of the spectrum, Lovell says: 'You had what Dad, or Favre [as the Mitfords named their father], called 'the Bolshies'. It was only a few years before they had actually murdered the Tsar and his family. I should think the upper-classes in England were shaking in their boots at the thought that communism would come to their country, as it had swept the continent. I think that's the reason why a lot of aristocrats were hoping that Hitler and fascism were the answer.' With that context, no matter how uncomfortable, it's not hard to discern why the arguments of the 1930s are once again replete with relevance. 'Life was just polarised,' says Lovell. 'In the same way that in 2016 we had Brexit. I don't know about you, but I lost friends over that. People were really fired up one way or the other. It's a minor thing, of course, compared with what they were arguing about in the 1930s, but people were forced to take a side.' The irony, and a bizarre coda for Outrageous, is that it is produced by Matthew Mosley. As his name suggests, he is the great-grandson of Oswald Mosley, who married the fourth Mitford sibling, Diana. 'I did almost meet Diana once in Paris, but it didn't happen in the end,' says Matthew Mosley, speaking in the production office as the grips busy themselves with the Diana and Tom scene on set. 'It's a very strange inheritance because, obviously, he [Oswald] is such a national hate figure. And rightly so, as he was peddling terrible ideas. For my generation, it's so far away, it's almost like he was someone from a different planet. But for my father's generation and my grandfather, it was a big thing to grapple with.' It may be far away, but today it is, oddly, also very close – just minutes from the production truck, Vanderham, as Diana, soon to be Mosley, is discussing her nuptials. And this being the Mitfords, there is always a drama to come: the wedding is to take place in Joseph Goebbels's home in Berlin – with Hitler as one of the guests. 'Maybe this will be something of a cautionary tale about the allure of the far Right,' says Williams. 'I would like to think that might be the case.'
Daily Mail
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Outrageous: This Downton Abbey with added fascism is frightfully unconvincing
How odd that no one can do a 1930s BBC accent any more. Any performer who attempts it sounds like Mr Cholmondley-Warner, the plummy twit from Harry Enfield's sketch show. The pre-war radio announcements in Outrageous sound like stilted send-ups. It's almost as though actors harbour a subconscious fear that, if they mimic those patrician tones too perfectly, people will imagine they are also imbued with the snobbish, class-ridden attitudes of the times. How frightful! Sadly, the dialogue is as unconvincing as the accents in this six-part period drama, a sort of Downton Abbey with added fascism. Beginning in 1931, and set in the gilded world of the British aristocracy, all country houses and glittering debutante dances, it's the story of the six ultra-privileged Mitford sisters. Joanna Vanderham plays the most famous of them, socialite Diana, who dumps her fabulously rich husband Brian Guinness to run off with the leader of the Blackshirts (Joshua Sasse). With the six young women, their parents and a brother, plus various chums all requiring introductions, screenwriter Sarah Williams relies on captions reminding us of their names. The producers have taken the trouble to put together a press pack for journalists, including a family tree with more than 25 names across four generations, that looks like the wiring diagram for Blackpool illuminations. Since viewers don't have that cribsheet, the characters constantly have to tell each other who they are. At one cocktail party, man-with-toothbrush-moustache approaches woman-with-tiara-glued-to-her-forehead and announces: 'Mrs Guinness? Oswald Mosley. Everyone calls me Tom.' Sadly, the dialogue is as unconvincing as the accents in this six-part period drama, a sort of Downton Abbey with added fascism Beginning in 1931, and set in the gilded world of the British aristocracy, all country houses and glittering debutante dances, it's the story of the six ultra-privileged Mitford sisters She blushes and demurs: 'I don't think we've been . . .' 'Introduced?' he adds helpfully. A voiceover is supplied by the oldest of the sisters, Nancy (Bessie Carter), who was a comic novelist with an acid turn of phrase — a sort of P.G. Wodehouse with a nasty streak. The real Nancy M. would have been mortified to have leaden lines like this foisted on her: 'This was the calm before the storm but, in a few short years, all hell would indeed break loose, and not just for my family but for the world.' If you're happy just to watch for the sumptuous sets and fabulous costumes, the sheer look of the thing does go some way to redeem this show. Turn the sound down and you could almost be seeing outtakes from Brideshead. But it's impossible to believe in this 21st-century version of the Mitfords. Vanderham in particular seems desperate to hold her character at arm's length, as though she's ashamed of playing the part. And Nancy's reluctant boyfriend, Hamish Erskine (James Musgrave) was once described as, 'like a kingfisher — all colour and sparkle and courage'. All we get is an insipid campness, like Mr Humphries fending off the attentions of Miss Brahms on Are You Being Served? 'Ground floor: perfumerie, stationery, Nazi salutes . . . going up!'
Vogue
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Fact v. Fiction: Just How Accurate Is Outrageous as a Portrait of the Mitford Sisters?
The brand-new BritBox series Outrageous is funny, fast-paced, and—to borrow a phrase from our compatriots across the pond—a cracking good time. But just how well does it hold up as a recounting of the lives of the Mitford sisters? Diana, Jessica, Unity, Nancy, Deborah, and Pamela Mitford were six of the most talked-about women of their time, so it's natural to wonder whether all of the stories in Sarah Williams's screenplay—based on Mary S. Lovell's 2001 book The Mitford Girls—are actually taken from real life. Well, fear not; we're here to sort out all the fact vs. fiction so that you can enjoy your viewing of the first two episodes of Outrageous without constantly pulling up Wikipedia to verify just how big of a fascist Diana Mitford actually was. (Spoiler: A really big one.) Find everything you need to know about the real-life history behind Outrageous below: Was Diana Mitford really married to one of the richest men in London? Well, yes! Before Diana wed Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, her first husband was Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne and the Guinness family brewing fortune. Guinness was one of London's 'Bright Young Things,' a group of aristocrats and socialites given that name by the tabloids because of their penchant for partying, drinking, and drug use; and the Guinness family's net worth would have been around $983 million today, making Diana's first husband undoubtedly one of the richest and most eligible men in her peer group at the time they met. Was Nancy Mitford's fiancé Hamish Erskine really gay? Erskine was, indeed, as 'out' as it was possible to be in pre-WWII England, even engaging in an affair with Nancy's brother, Tom Mitford, while at Eton College. Still, he captured Nancy's heart; the male lead in Nancy's first novel, Highland Fling, is based on Erskine. 'Hamish was a perfectly ghastly character,' art historian and The Horror of Love author Lisa Hilton told the New Zealand Herald recently. 'But Nancy was still quite prim and spinsterish and I do wonder if there wasn't some sort of subliminal self-protection, because she spent so long with him. By not getting married, as her contemporaries did, very early in their 20s, she sort of preserved herself. She did have many more suitable men who wanted to marry her but she carried on with the giggling Hamish. I think that says a lot about her own sexual issues ... perhaps she didn't want to get married.' Did hunger marchers really come to the Mitfords' doorstep? There's no specific evidence to suggest that hunger marchers actually protested outside the Mitfords' family home (as they're seen doing in Outrageous), but known pacifist Jessica Mitford developed her keen sense of social justice early in her life, and in her 1960 autobiography Hons and Rebels, she describes the political landscape of London thusly: 'Hunger marches, at first small demonstrations, later involving populations of whole areas, were reported in the papers…Old concepts of patriotism, flag-waving, jingoism were under violent attack by the younger writers. The creed of pacifism, born of a determination to escape the horrors of a new world war, swept the youth. I responded, like many another of my generation, by becoming first a convinced pacifist, then quickly graduating to socialist ideas.' Were Unity and Jessica Mitford really close? It might seem surprising that Unity and Jessica were so close, given the extreme divergence in their politics, but the way they're depicted shopping, strolling, and debating serious ideas together on Outrageous is grounded in real life. Born three years apart (Unity in 1914, Jessica in 1917), the two shared a bedroom growing up, with Jessica's side decorated with hammer and sickles and pictures of Vladimir Lenin and Unity's decorated with swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler. However, their relationship would also be marked by periods of estrangement. Did Unity Mitford really have a pet rat? Apparently so, according to Lauren Young's 2022 book Hitler's Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII, which notes that Unity 'attended balls with her pet snake, Enid, around her neck and let loose her rat, Ratular, when things got boring, which they invariably did.'
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Debutantes are gone, the class divide remains: How life has changed since Nancy Mitford's pursuit of love
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? 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). 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. 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. 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.' 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'. 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. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Debutantes are gone, the class divide remains: How life has changed since Nancy Mitford's pursuit of love
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.
