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.