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  • Published: 18 June 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241984079
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.00

The Pursuit of Love

With Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing




Mitford's beloved novel published as a Penguin Essential for the first time

'Obsessed with sex!' said Jassy, 'there's nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I'm a pygmalionist.'
In the end we got far more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding.
'Ducks can only copulate,' said Linda, after studying this for a while, 'in running water. Good luck to them.'

Oh the tedium of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the look out for the perfect lover. But finding Mr Right is much harder than any of the sisters thought. Linda must suffer marriage first to a stuffy Tory MP and then to a handsome and humorousless communist before finding real love in war-torn Paris . . .

The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest, sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written.

  • Published: 18 June 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241984079
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.00

About the author

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford was born in London on November 28 1904, daughter of the second Baron Redesdale, and the eldest of six girls. Her sisters included Lady Diana Mosley; Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and Jessica, who immortalised the Mitford family in her autobiography Hons and Rebels. The Mitford sisters came of age during the Roaring Twenties and wartime in London, and were well known for their beauty, upper-class bohemianism or political allegiances. Nancy contributed columns to The Lady and the Sunday Times, as well as writing a series of popular novels including The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which detailed the high-society affairs of the six Radlett sisters. While working in London during the Blitz, Nancy met and fell in love with Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle's chief of staff, and eventually moved to Paris to be near him. In the 1950s she began writing historical biographies - her life of Louis XIV, The Sun King, became an international bestseller. Nancy completed her last book, Frederick the Great, before she died of Hodgkin's disease on 30 June 1973.

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Praise for The Pursuit of Love

Utter, utter bliss

Daily Mail

A dazzling comic delight

Fiona Wilson, The Times, Saturday Review

The story's genius lies in its wicked humour, which remains relentlessly uplifting even as the Blitz begin to smash all the hopes of that pre-war arcadia

Olivia Laing, The Guardian

Too spiky and intelligent, I think, to qualify as an altogether cosy read [...] beneath the brittle surface of Mitford's wit there is something infinitely more melancholy at work - something that is apt to snag you and pull you into its dark undertow when you are least expecting it

Zoë Heller, The Telegraph

Nancy Mitford taught the wonderful truth that laughter can see you through the darkest hours of your life

Daily Mail

The Millennial faint-hearted will be appalled by Mitford's depiction of class and gender. But Mitford's triumph is that, as the Radletts live and laugh and cry, we [cry] with them

Julie Parsons, The Irish Times

In her novels Nancy mastered her life, making everyone who was different or difficult into figures of mirth, moving only among the aristocracy, and infusing the world with a spirit of lazy, delightful romance

Natasha Walter, The Independent

Utter, utter bliss

Daily Mail

A dazzling comic delight.

Fiona Wilson, The Times, Saturday Review