Horror of Love, ' "I have given up everything!"'

I knew this book was coming out and my partner who is a library sleuth brought it home for me.  It is not what you would expect  this is the story of Nancy Mitford, the author who wrote her classic books around her family and her life with witty observation and let's face it the British aren't into therapy.  I guess that is why they are such good authors and dramatists.

This books tells the story of how the socialite Nancy met her Colonel Palweski of the Free French during WWII.  Working in a London Book store during the war  she began to meet a lot of French soldiers  who had managed to escape France and to organize themselves under DeGualle.   She meets the Polish by birth but French by adoption Colonel and it is love at first sight.  Although Nancy is married to a Mr. Rodd a marriage, that had seen better days.  The Colonel realizes she is the kind of society lady he finds most alluring.   Nancy has never known a man of his type, part rogue but a charming one.

The resulting collaboration helps the Colonel to aspire to being a politician, diplomat and party leader.  Nancy goes on to become a famous author, outside her family name.

Nancy and the Colonel remain lovers and end up in different cities.   The Colonel becomes the Ambassador to Rome.

The joy of this book is the fact you are reading about a French/English lover affair in a era when civility was still the norm.   Gaston was considered, 'doue pour faire plaisir aux femmes". to put it bluntly, build for love.   Nancy brought up in the English upper class, did not expect to meet a man such as Gaston very sophisticated and with Nancy's charm and wit the two were meant to be.  However, marriage was not necessarily going to happen for them.   Oddly for all of Gaston's accomplishments it was Nancy who made him famous as, Fabrice, in her wonderful book, Love in a Cold Climate which I have already written a blog on.   However the third summer of the war provided them with coup de foudre of that third summer, was to provide them both with the most significant personal and emotional attachment of their lives.

Gaston's story has been told as an accessory to Nancy's life, which has been documented as part of the myth of her beautiful. fanatical, compelling family.  It is also the story of one of the most  passionately exciting periods of French history, illuminates not only the life of an extraordinary man, but the world of one of the most popular and influential writer's of the 20th Century.

Each of her novels is an education for women, 'The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold' climate where Nancy's romantic philosophy become civilization and adult.   'The Blessing' provides her heroine, Grace with an education to accept, her French husband's infidelity.   'Don't Tell Alfred', is an exploration of and a warning against the imported American worship of youth.

The point made is the one essential for happiness is not self exposure or mutual dependency but great good manners.  None of this is very revolutionary but by looking at modern woman's magazines we are still bewildered, enthralled and terrified by our failure to achieve what feminism has taught us we deserve.   For all Gaston's selfish career obsessed philanderer:  Nancy was febrile, needy and given to shrieking, yet the discipline, tenderness and gentillesse of their relationship exposes the limitations of modern sexual mores.

'"I've given up everything", I said, " My friends, my family, my country," and he simply roared with laughter and then of course so did I.'

You can not help but love, Nancy Mitford, the writer and her observations.

The ideal woman was a good manager- no small task with only a wood stoves, kerosene lamps, inadequate water..

And the nearest store for canned goods fifty to a hundred miles away.  She was toughened by adversity, laughed at her fears, knew how to fix things which broke in the house, and stifled any craving she might once had for beauty.  She could care for the sick, help fight a bushfire, aid a horse or cow in difficult labour, laugh and joke at life's absurdities and reverses, and like a man, mock any sign of weakness or lack of stoicism in her children.

This is Jill Ker Conway's description of the woman who went with the husbands or families to live on the plain or western New South Wales.  Although she is talking about the people she grew up with and she could be speaking of any country and the woman who grew up close to the land.  Although living and growing up on a station of thousands of miles and living day to day by the seasons with know one around unless you have some help mostly men to run the property.

Jill Ker Conway grew up alone except for her parents and her brother's who although sent to Sydney for school.  Her Mother an intelligent and hard working woman who was also a trained nurse had the foresight  to teach her to read and treat it like a special treat they shared.   Jill childhood was shadowed by two events;  WWII and the beginning of a nine year drought.  The war saw every  fit man sign up  and left few to work on the stations, and the drought which destroyed her families livelihood and broke her Father's spirit.   Jill worked as an eight year old, with her Father to try and maintain the sheep which were what, brought in the money they needed, through wool export and to fed themselves.   They also had some cattle and sheep.  It is hard to vision a child of eight riding to mend fences when she could hardly mount a horse or fed starved sheep but she did.

The tragedy of those years was the loss of her Father whom she loved and whose last words to her were to leave and do something better with her life.

This is just the beginning of a young woman who finds herself eventually in a private school in Sydney, where her brilliant mind is challenged and she comes into her own.
Her Mother having left the station in capable hands, then moves into Sydney to educate her children after the lose of her husband to succeed in eventually turning the station into a profitable place.   Her Mother succeeds financially but succumbs to the grief of the loss of her husband, and the life of respect she has known on the station.   Jill has to support her Mother and she does this well until another lose in the family creates the emotional break down of this ounce independent older woman.

Jill Ker Conway succeeds in the academic world although is not in awe of the old colonial system which sees Sydney's brightest go off to the great universities of England.   Eventually she makes her mark at Harvard in the United States.   She marries a Canadian, John Conway, and travels to England and then to Toronto, for her husband to take up his post as the head of York University.   Jill works for the University of Toronto then is asked to be its Vice President, an honour for the first woman to take the post.  

This book, road from the Coorain, and the video of the story is inspirational for any woman who has struggled to over come the adversity of a difficult childhood and the dream to go on in higher education.  This is only half of her story.    

There is a photo in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children...There they are held like flies in the amber of that moment - click goes the camera and on goes life.

What can you say about Nancy Mitford?  'Love in a Cold Climate,' loosely based on real life events,
 and the, 'Pursuit of Love,' to name just two of her wonderful novels.      

In these novels, she shows herself to be one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of English in the last century.  She has been attacked for writing about people with money and she was also considered to be superficial.  She had her limitations, and her readers do as well.  She refused to accept that the seriousness of what she had to say was compromised by the size of the houses her characters lived in.  At her best she became a classic, because what she never fails is the ravishingly modulated tone, the inimitable and irresistible voice leading us onwards.

Nancy Mitford books are light, undemanding and very funny.  They are also graceful, strong and troubling.

'The Pursuit of Love,' is fascinating odd and slightly embarrassing, as someone prepared to tell you the story of their lives often seems.  "Love in a Cold Climate,' is the masterpiece.

Mitford excels at using her wit to put the upper classes in perspective.

Lady Mondore says about the Kroesig sister, training to be a vet - 'First sensible thing I ever heard about any of them.  No point cluttering up the ballrooms with girls who look like that, its simply not fair on anybody.'

You feel that you are privy to someone else world but in a humorous, and well written way.  We are alloyed to  witness the character's struggles to find love, but never to their  future happiness.  It is something to big and wonderful for us as reader's to intrude on.

A perfectly judged and time comic novel but something more than that, too.  Death enters, and it is greeted with a rueful shrug, as lady Montdore says, "Poor Patricia - well never mind, that's all over now.'

Then the wise attitude of Aunt Sadie.

'It is the dropping off the perch... I've always dread when that begins.  Soon we shall all have gone - oh well never mind.'

Really 'Love in a Cold Climate' is about England and the sees "a sweet view - sweet to the eye and the mind.   The eternal English landscape, English order and a voice deeply moving in its unspoken convictions.

Funny, witty and poignant maybe that is Nancy Mitford gift to her reader's.

'Did you live here when you were small, Ma?'

Those are the word of the son of Helen Forrester, the wonderful author of a series of books and novels who explore her past as a child of the middle class thrust in to the world of depression era Liverpool.  Brought up in the gentle south-west of England who had been shielded from the rougher side of life by a private school system and obedient servants, had nearly gone mad with panic when thrust among the unemployed of Liverpool, a city brought down by the great depression of the 1930's.   She was only twelve and a half years old and made responsible for her brother's and sister's with parents who besides there despair were hopeless to change what they had brought amongst themselves.

Helen Forrester is brave and honest her writing and her ability to face life straight on.   Her first book, 'Two Pence to Cross the Mersey", and the ones that followed I have read her biographies at least four times.  I find her words and her sheer determination to overcome what life has thrown at her compelling and brave.   You live every step with Helen as she works and climbs her way out of the terrifying poverty of her childhood to achieve a semblances of dignity and educate herself.

She is definitely one of my heroines.  She was only made famous by her writing and ability to give woman courage to accomplish what they have in their hearts.  

I am harmonious, happy, radiant...

I am harmonious, happy, radiant:  detached from the tyranny of fear.
My happiness is built upon a rock.  it is mine now and for all eternity.

These are the words of Florence Scovel Shinn.   They are from her wonderful books, The Game of Life and How to Play it.   Florence born in Camden, New Jersey in 1871.  She was the wife of American painter Everett Shinn.  She spent many years working as an artist and illustrator of children's literature in New York before writing her New Thought Classic.  She published the book herself in 1925 and went on to write three more books.  She became widely regarded as an important American spiritual teacher and lecturer.  She died in New York in 1940.

A year ago I found this wonderful little book and have found it inspiring.   Maybe it is an awakening in faith or an acknowledgment of spirituality.   It does make you feel positive and give hope for living.

Is it amazing that a woman who lived and wrote in the early part of the last century can be so inspiring to woman of our 21st century.   I think it is fulfilling to reach back and finds words that give you strength and comfort in an age of instant communication.  This is the wonder of words and the power of them also.

I think this is comfort food for the soul.