Nancy Mitford

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Standard Name: Mitford, Nancy
Birth Name: Nancy Mitford
Married Name: Nancy Rodd
NM is best-known for her novels, witty comedies of twentieth-century manners which draw on her own privileged background. Her accounts of love and disappointment among the upper classes frequently include political references (fascism, communism) or have wartime settings (Spanish Civil War, World War Two). She also wrote biography, translation, and essays and journalism including a famous squib about the way the English language reflects the social class of the speaker.
Head-and-shoulders drawing of Nancy Mitford by William Acton, 1937. Her dark, wavy hair is parted in the centre; her bare shoulders rise smoothly from the background.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Fictionalization Violet Trefusis
Some resemblances to VT also emerge in Lady Montdore of Love in a Cold Climate, one of the best-known works by her friend Nancy Mitford .
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo, 1997.
303
Sharpe, Henrietta. A Solitary Woman: A Life of Violet Trefusis. Constable, 1981.
162
She was repeatedly and unattractively portrayed...
Friends, Associates Violet Trefusis
The following year Lowndes stayed with Trefusis at West Coker Manor.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Marques, Susan LowndesEditor , Chatto and Windus, 1971.
273
At this time VT nurtured her (often edgy) relationship with writer Nancy Mitford , who moved from England to Paris in April...
Friends, Associates Evelyn Waugh
He counted among his friends Graham Greene and his fellow comic novelists Nancy Mitford and Muriel Spark .
Friends, Associates Sybille Bedford
Introduced to Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria by the South African poet Roy Campbell while at Sanary, the young SB became their intimate friend.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint, 2005.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
Friends, Associates Mary Wesley
Even when they lived in a remote spot, the Siepmanns' circle of close literary friends included Nancy Mitford , Graham Greene , Antonia White , and Emily Coleman .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
When MW became successful as a...
Friends, Associates Lady Charlotte Elliot
Little is known of LCE 's married or social lives, or of how much, if at all, she moved in literary circles: one writer she knew was Theodore Watts-Dunton . She wrote and illustrated a...
Literary responses Berta Ruck
Among other positive responses BR had to these programmes was a letter from Nancy Mitford in Paris.
Ruck, Berta. An Asset to Wales. Hutchinson, 1970.
124
Literary responses Sybille Bedford
Nancy Mitford called A Legacyone of the very best novels I've ever read.
Bedford, Sybille. Jigsaw. Penguin, 1999.
prelims
Evelyn Waugh called it entirely delicious . . . cool . . . elegant.
Dirda, Michael. “Sips from the finest vintage”. Guardian Weekly, p. 25.
25
Reviewing a reprint for the...
Literary responses Frances Hodgson Burnett
This book is said to have been particularly appreciated by later novelists Nancy Mitford and Marghanita Laski . The early twenty-first-century reprint was very well reviewed, and was likened to the work of Edith Wharton .
Persephone Books.
Literary responses Elizabeth Jane Howard
Arthur Koestler described this, before publication, as a cross between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh . When EJH told him she was having trouble finishing it, he said she had finished it, and written beyond...
Publishing Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
This book, set in the period which in England was Elizabethan , became notorious before publication through private salon readings. When published in Paris by Barbin , with the author's name withheld, it was immediately...
Reception Barbara Pym
Another element that makes her hard to place is her comedy. Though her work has been likened to that of Drabble and Lively (both her champions) her place is rather with out-and-out satirists like Angela Thirkell
Textual Features Kate O'Brien
KOB refers to women writers here and there in her text—casually to Daisy Ashford and Nancy Mitford , admiringly to Maria Edgeworth and Lady Gregory (the latter admittedly for her life rather than her writings)—and...
Textual Features Elizabeth Jane Howard
Passages in The Lover's Companion are grouped according to different kinds of love situation (first love, love at first sight, unrequited love, etc.). Authors used include Jane Austen , Anthony Trollope , Oscar Wilde ,...
Textual Production Deborah Moggach
DM has written a number of TV screenplays, both from her own prose and that of others, and in the form of original scripts, from which several of her novels were expanded. She has adapted...

Timeline

1 January 1916
The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast in Hanover Square, London.
21 August 1993
The remains of 155 former inmates of a Magdalene Asylum run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge were discovered in unmarked graves on property sold to developers at High Park in...
9 December 2006-17 July 2007
The National Portrait Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of photographs of women writers, mostly novelists, from 1920 to 1960.