Profile of Nancy Mitford on Famous Like Me

The Honourable Nancy Mitford, CBE, (November 28, 1904 -June 30, 1973), novelist and biographer, was born in London, the eldest daughter of Baron Redesdale. She is one of the noted Mitford sisters, was an essayist in, and editor of, Noblesse Oblige (1956), in which she famously helped to originate the famous 'U', or upper-class, and 'non-U' classification of linguistic usage and behaviour(see U and non-U English) -although this is something she saw as a bit of a tease rather than a serious matter. She is best known for her series of novels about upper-class life but she also wrote three well-received biographies.

In 1933, after a going-nowhere romance with homosexual Scottish aristocrat Hamish St. Clair Erskine, she married Peter Rodd, the youngest son of Sir Rennell Rodd. (Sir Rennell was a British ambassador to Italy, a former poet, and possibly a one-time lover of Oscar Wilde according to historian Neil McKenna). The Rodds, who were separated for many years, were divorced in 1958 (although Nancy's surname appears as Rodd on her headstone). At the end of World War II she moved to Paris, partly to be near French soldier and politician (Charles de Gaulle's chief of staff) Col. Gaston Palewski, whom she always called 'Colonel' and with whom she had a relationship in London during the war. The largely one-sided affair, which inspired the romance between Linda Kroesig and Fabrice de Sauveterre in Mitford's novel "'The Pursuit of Love"', lasted fitfully until Palewski's affair with and eventual 1969 marriage to Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duchess of Sagan (1915-2003), a beautiful socialite who was the former wife of Count James de Pourtalés and a granddaughter of American railroad magnate Jay Gould.

Nancy Mitford was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1972.

Nancy Mitford died of cancer on June 30, 1973 in Versailles. Her remains were brought home to England and interred in the Swinbrook Churchyard in Oxfordshire with those of her younger sisters, Unity Mitford (1914-1948), Diana Mosley (1910-2003) and Pamela Jackson (1907-1994).

She was the author of:

• Highland Fling (1931)
• Christmas Pudding (1932)
• Wigs on the Green (1935)
• Pigeon Pie (1940)
• The Pursuit of Love (1945)
• Love in a Cold Climate (1949)
• The Blessing (1951)
• Madame de Pompadour (1954)
• Voltaire in Love (1957)
• Don't Tell Alfred (1960)
• The Water Beetle (1962)
• The Sun King (1966)
• Frederick the Great (1970)

External link

• Literary Encyclopedia: Nancy Mitford

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