She leaves Tony for the handsome but selfish Christian (whom I rather love but am amazed to find that the actor who played him in this was married to Neve Campbell for a while), whom she joins in Spain where he is doing something or other to do with Communism. Linda is the terrifying but essentially warm hearted Uncle Matthew’s favourite daughter and we follow her progress from excitable debutante to wife of boring Tony whose one romantic gesture was to wade into a pond to rescue a hare. Linda Radlett, the beautiful heroine of The Pursuit of Love, is my favourite character and is clearly based on a mixture of Mitford’s own sisters as well as Nancy herself although I think the Mitford Girls would have made mincemeat of her had they ever actually met. I can’t believe that I hadn’t already bought this one actually as Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love feature VERY highly in my list of favourite books and this adaptation combines both and is very true to the sprightly spirit of the original texts.įrom the bizarre start, with Uncle Matthew conducting his annual Child Hunt through the grounds to the tragic ending, this tale of eccentric aristocracy, Keeping One’s End Up and doomed love never fails to hold me completely under its spell as the glorious, witty young things of Mitford’s books, who hide their vulnerability and desperate desire to be loved beneath a brittle veneer of faux sophistication, bumble from one disaster to the next.

In an unusual moment of presentience, I ordered a DVD copy of the 2001 dramatisation of Nancy Mitford’s Love In A Cold Climate before I fell ill, which meant I had the perfect thing to watch while lying in bed feeling sorry for myself.

Love in a cold climate book