#themitfordsisters

Writer Grace Dent asks: What's love got to do with it?

“I would pass The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford on to anybody who enjoys my writing and its sarcasm, its look at society and the way that I take the mick out of people. I would pass them this because she blows my stuff out of the water. She takes it to a new level.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

We are filming in a bedroom of a hotel in Hoxton. Grace Dent begins to wax lyrical about Nancy Mitford and The Pursuit of Love while the make up artist is still applying make up for the shoot. 

“The Mitford family are one of the most fascinating British families in history. 

Their story weaves through all of establishment and all of the big moments of history. They met everybody; they knew everybody; they shagged everybody. They were absolutely fascinating,” she says.

For Dent, Nancy Mitford’s writing has been a huge influence on her own.

“I would pass The Pursuit of Love on to anybody who enjoys my writing and its sarcasm, its look at society and the way that I take the mick out of people. I would pass them this because she blows my stuff out of the water. She takes it to a new level.”

But it’s more than that, too. This book is cheering, warm, funny and packed with strong-minded women. 

“I would pass it to any strong-minded woman who wants to be illuminated that there were other strong women in the 1930s and the 1940s, who were also making bad marriages, finding themselves married to someone where they had had the lovely big wedding, then had realised that they were absolutely tied, that they fancied somebody else, didn’t really want a baby, and didn’t quite understand what their place in life was. All that was going on in the 1930s and 1940s, just as it is now.”

“She just really nails all of those emotions and makes you realise that things don’t really change. The years go on, but we all make the same mistakes.”

“In The Pursuit of Love, the idea is: “Do you just put up and shut up?”. Most women around that time did. But my favourite character in the book, Linda, doesn’t.”

Dent, reads aloud her favourite passage.

“Now, that he was grown up and married, he had put all three resolutely behind him, spending his days in the bank house and his evenings at Westminster, never having any fun or breathing any fresh air. His true self emerged and he was revealed as a pompous, money-grubbing ass, more like his father every day.”

“There you go. There is marriage.”

Grace Dent is a journalist, broadcaster and the author of eleven books for teenagers. You can read her columns each week in The Independent. She chose Nancy Mitford’s 1945 comic society novel, The Pursuit of Love. It’s the first in a trio of novels – the next is Love in a Cold Climate, published in 1949.