The Pursuit of Love (Television Tie-in)

This madcap masterpiece about growing up among the privileged and eccentric in England and finding love in all the wrong places is now the basis for a star-studded television series.
 

Nancy Mitford modeled the characters in her best-known novel on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, visiting their Gloucestershire estate. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children are recklessly eager to grow up. The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice. Her hilarious adventures vividly evoke the lost glamour of aristocratic life in England between the wars.
 

NANCY MITFORD (1904–1973) was the eldest daughter of Lord Redesdale. She grew up with her five sisters and one brother on the family estate. A beauty and a wit, she became one of the "bright young things" of the 1920s, a close friend of Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and their circle. She began writing novels while in her twenties. In all, she wrote eight novels and four biographies (of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XIV, Voltaire, and Frederick the Great).