Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Mitford, Nancy. The Pursuit of Love. English Edition, Third Printing. 1947. Book is in very good condition; dust jacket is in very good minus condition—jacket shows minor edge tears, mild paper loss to the corners, and darkening to the back cover.
This is Nancy Mitford’s breakthrough novel. The principal family, the Radletts, is a barely disguised version of Mitford’s own. Its lightness and laugh-out-loud funny passages do not mean this is not a work to be taken seriously. Part of the genius is how the romantic never overwhelms the comic. Style and delight always prevail, which is also how Mitford lived her own life. This work is only improving with age. Early printings of the English edition are in short supply and are preferred to the American, which has a less attractive dust jacket and was released after its English counterpart.
“The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives.”
--Nancy Mitford