We are currently highlighting our display - Around the World with Books - featuring novels for travelers. This week we want to draw your attention to books by Nancy and Jessica Mitford, as well as to biographies written about them and their sisters.
The Mitford Sisters: Lives of Notoriety
The Mitford Sisters, descended from a long line of English aristocrats, achieved contemporary notoriety for their disparate politics and public feuds during the Second World War.
Nancy and Jessica (Decca) became well-known writers. Nancy wrote mostly novels, many of which were recently reprinted by Vintage, with introductions from a cast of contemporary writers. These introductions really add value to revisiting these classics. In her introduction to Nancy’s most autobiographical novel, The Pursuit of Love ($14.95), novelist Zoe Heller notes that, much like the sisters, Nancy’s writing often met with fervor: “Mitford’s fiction is strong meat. Readers who love it....tend to love it with a dotty passion; others, who escape the enchantment, are apt to despise it...”
Decca tended toward muckrakers and memoirs, writing several volumes of each. She was a prolific letter writer; and Peter Y. Sussman has collected her letters in Decca (Knopf, $35). Interest in the sisters and their lives over recent years have lead to frequent publication of biographies about the family, notably The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (W. W. Norton, $18.95), by Mary S. Lovell, and The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (Harper Pernnial, $19.95), edited by Charlotte Mosley.
Come and look at our display of books in the store. Click here to read more about books by - and about - the infamous Mitfords.
Click here to see books - sorted by regions of the world - recommended by our booksellers.