He was the great love of her life...one always thinks that every, every time

"He was the great love of her life...one always thinks that every, every time."

This is how Nancy Mitford ends her novel on love: sardonically.


Since the last quietly hilarious book I read - Excellent Women - I've kept my eye out. Because who doesn't love self effacing commentary on love and being a woman?

Mitford's The Pursuit of Love depicts - of course - the search for love, but also the search for self (sometimes through love). Luckily, the reader gets to hang out with Mitford's perfectly flawed characters, getting to know them first as children who engage in Child Hunts (it is what it sounds like...only no death) with their eccentric father and hunting dogs, but then as teenagers who yearn for social norms.

There are clashes between generations, mainly: "The argument...that young men were not very likely to propose to girls they hardly knew, was brushed aside as nonsense."

But once the ladies get out into the world, they realize some things: "...the behavior of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected."

The entire book is pulled off with an air of light seriousness. I imagine the following line being said/thought sitting on a chase wearing a silk dressing gown, martini in one hand while the other waves lazily to make her point: "She had found neither great love nor great happiness...and now she was doomed to the lonely, hunted life of a beautiful but unattached woman."

In the end, love is found, but there's a war on.

The lesson (if you are a true romantic) seems to be: die at the apex of love.

"Like all the very young we took it for granted that making love is child's play."
Nancy Mitford