This is the novel I turn to when I am in need of cheering myself up. It is such a cosy, comfortable read: just right as we enter a long period of austerity. I love all the eccentric characters: volatile Uncle Matthew, vague Aunt Sadie, Lord Merlin and my favourite, charming Davey Warbeck. I love Nancy Mitford’s humour, eye for detail and her descriptive, elegant style of writing that captures an era long gone.
I especially love the scene when Linda arrives back at her Paris home to find her two old friends waiting for her in the drawing room who invite her for lunch the next day at the Ritz.
One boiling hot afternoon in July she arrived home wearing a new and particularly ravishing straw hat. It was large and simple with a wreath of flowers and two blue bows. Her right arm was full of roses and carnations, and in her left hand was a striped bandbox, containing another exquisite hat.
The novel is bitter-sweet, funny and tragic, set against the uncertainties of war; Linda’s happiness is fleeting as she finds the great love of her life too late.
When I first read this novel I laughed and laughed but now I smile, as I do when someone tells familiar jokes I thought I’d long forgotten. My sister Sarah loves this story too and it’s created a bond between us, recalling ‘the thin end of the wedge’, the diseased fossils and Uncle Matthew’s disapproval of Linda’s tulle ball-gown, ‘on the grounds that he had known three women burnt to death in tulle ball-dresses’.
It’s very comforting to know this book will always be around, whatever the future holds.
So the winter slowly passed. The spring came with extraordinary beauty, as always at Alconleigh, with a brilliance of colouring, a richness of life, that one had forgotten to expect during the cold winter months
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