“Love in a Cold Climate” (1949) is a novel by Nancy Mitford, one of the Mitford sisters. Set in England in 1929, just before the Crash, Polly Hampton, a beauty of the age, is the daughter of one of the richest families in England. But no man wants to marry her – nor she them. She has a secret which will blow a hole into the story halfway through. It does have a gay character, but it is not Polly. It is a satire of the decadent rich of England and of romance novels themselves.
It is part of a trilogy:
- The Pursuit of Love (1945)
- Love in a Cold Climate (1949)
- Don’t Tell Alfred (1960)
I have not read the other two, so it can certainly be read independently of them. Goodreads rates “Pursuit” highest, but Nancy Mitford herself preferred “Cold Climate”.
Miniseries: British television has made it into a miniseries twice – in 1980 (with Judi Dench) and in 2001 (by the BBC).
Like Jane Austen it is set in the world of large English landowners, of parties, suitors, gossip, drawing rooms, romance – and being cut out of the will. It takes place barely a hundred years after Austen, yet the rich are markedly more:
Decadent: too decadent for the Ladies’ Home Journal to serialize in 1949. Everyone sleeps with everyone, married or not. If you are rich enough, people let you get away with almost anything. The Victorian moral certainties, at least among the rich, are gone.
Being rich in Mitford is like being on a cruise ship: you do not have to go to work or school or cook or clean. The rich and powerful all know each other, so for them England is like a small town – supported by a quarter of the world, starting with their servants and tenants and extending all the way to Africa and Asia. Not because the rich are more moral (hardly) or more intelligent (if only) – but because they had the singular talent of being born into the right family.
She cuts down romance novels themselves, at least the Jane Austen sort. Lovesick suitors do not hang about the edges of great English estates. Nor do their beaux write them secret love letters – they are too busy gossiping with their cousin or arguing with their mother.
The best line:
“Love indeed! Whoever invented love ought to be shot.”
My favourite passage:
“They, in their turns, all became notable breeders, so that the Boreley tentacles had spread by now over a great part of the West of England and there seemed to be absolutely no end of Boreley cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters and their respective in-laws. There was very little variety about them; they all had the same cross, white guinea-pig look, thought alike, and led the same sort of lives […] In short they were the backbone of England. […] However, like Gandhi, Bernard Shaw and Labby the Labrador, they continued to flourish and no terrible Boreley holocaust ever took place.”
– Abagond, 2019.
See also:
- books – books I read in 2019
- 1949 media diet review
- Jane Austen
- Belle
- English country houses
- British Empire
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Abagond 
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