Nancy was the novelist. Here is how the New York Times marked her passing.
Nancy Mitford, the prolific essayist, novelist and historian whose writing was enlivened by satire and a firm British aristocratic perspective, died yesterday at her home in Versailles, France. She was 68 years old.
Unabashedly snobbish and devastatingly witty, Miss Mitford achieved enormous success and popularity as one of Britain's most piercing observers of social manners.
....In one of her most recent books, "The Sun King," which is a portrait of Louis XIV's life at Versailles, Miss Mitford unhesitatingly compared the plumbing at Versailles with what she had known on her own visits to Buckingham Palace in 1923.
Indeed, one of Miss Mitford's pet concerns entered the history of obscure literary debates when, in 1955, she published perhaps her most famous essay on upper-class and non-upper- class forms of speech.
The essay sparked such a controversy in Britain, with responses from many major literary figures, that Miss Mitford was compelled a year later to bring out a thin book, "Noblesse Oblige," with her disquisition on the subject as its centerpiece.
Her argument, a set-piece even today among literary parlor games, was that the more elegant euphemism used for any word is usually the non-upperclass thing [non-U] to say...
Thus: It is very non-U to say "dentures"; "false teeth" will do. Ill is non-U; sick is U. The non-U person resides at his home. The U person lives in his house. And so forth.
...She was the oldest of six daughters of Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, who lived with Lady Redesdale at Swinbrook, the family estate in Oxfordshire.
The girls called their father "Old Subhuman." "My father and mother, illiterate themselves, were against education, and we girls had none though we were taught to ride and to speak French," Miss Mitford wrote in "Twentieth Century Authors." ....
Miss Mitford was not the only family member to win fame. In America, her most well- known sibling is her younger sister, Jessica, the author, who wrote of the girls' childhood in her own memoirs, "Daughters and Rebels."
Miss Mitford's first novel, "Highland Fling," in 1931, was--like many that followed--a "comedy of manners" based on her own experiences.....
Better received [than her early efforts] were "Pursuit of Love," 1945; "Love in a Cold Climate," 1949, and "The Blessing," 1951. These were sometimes frankly sentimental but possessed of a wit that Phyllis McGinley, the poet, found "quite funny and rather frightening." Among the victims of her humor were Americans of any kind.
Eventually Miss Mitford moved to history--"by way of fiction," as Louis Auchincloss put it. In 1954 she wrote a biography of Madame de Pompadour and in 1966 her study of Louis XIV. Her most recent book, "Frederick the Great," was published three years ago.
"She seems to have brought a new talent to the study of history," Mr. Auchincloss wrote in 1969, "that of the sophisticated, worldly wise observer, who is able to penetrate old archives with a fresh eye for qualities in the dead that she is specially qualified to recognize."...
We see Nancy Mitford's fresh eye on the subject of cats. Everybody loves kittens, to read the literature. Mitford wrote to her mother on December 16, 1959: "Alas old animals are so much nicer. I love my cat now but it took about eight years."
This from the Oxford Book of Humorous Quotations (1995).
No comments:
Post a Comment