Beautiful, aristocratic and controversial, the Mitford sisters are still famous, largely because the oldest, Nancy, enriched her eight novels with details from her family's eccentric lives. In Life in a Cold Climate, Laura Thompson (The Six: Lives of the Mitford Sisters) investigates this enigmatic woman through her books and letters, and through interviews with two of her sisters, casting a brilliant light upon a writer whose glamour kept her books from receiving the respect they deserved.
Nancy Mitford (1904-1973) wrote her first novel, Highland Fling, to augment her income. When it became popular, she swiftly wrote three others and found that writing wasn't just a money-making endeavor--it was the core of her life.
Mitford outraged her family by satirizing them in her early books. In her masterpiece, The Pursuit of Love, she cannibalized their lives with cruel charm, creating what Thompson calls "the Mitford myth." Turning her family into vivid caricatures, she guaranteed they would be forever haunted by their fictional counterparts. This novel and those that followed were bestsellers, yet eroded her relationships with her mother and sisters.
Writing always came first for Nancy Mitford. Even the men she loved didn't get in the way of her work; after one disastrous marriage, she never embarked on another. Later, in France, she wrote four scholarly, readable historical biographies that were overshadowed by her fiction. Soon after completing Frederick the Great, her "light and sparkling" voice was silenced by cancer.
"The trouble with Nancy's life is she doesn't come first with anybody," her sister Diana once said. In this stunning biography of Nancy Mitford, she comes first, under an unshared spotlight, at last. --Janet Brown, author and former bookseller