This is a tale of an eccentric aristocratic family, living between the ends of the First and Second World Wars, doing their best to grow up and change with the times. Mitford has taken most of the stories and details from her own aristocratic upbringing, putting together what today might be labeled autobiographical fiction. The novel is narrated by a poorer cousin, who spends her many holidays and hunting seasons on the Radlett estate, Alconleigh. In this novel, Mitford has re-christened her father, Uncle Mathew, who “had four magnificent bloodhounds, with which he used to hunt his children.” (It was more playfully eccentric than sadistic.) Aunt Sadie was the more loving, if also more clueless, of the pair. “Aunt Sadie, who so much disliked hearing about health that people often took her for a Christian Scientist, which, indeed, she might have become had she not disliked hearing about religion even more.” Like many aristocratic families, the Radletts did not live life on an even keel. “The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in the black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives.”
When the jewel of the Radlett family, Linda, marries into a family of bankers, with the distinctly Teutonic family name, Kroesig, against her family’s wishes, it was bound not to be a fitting match. “For the first time in her life, she found herself face to face with the bourgeois attitude of mind…. The Kroesigs said notepaper, perfume, mirror and mantelpiece, they even invited her to call them Father and Mother…. Inwardly their spirit was utterly commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for the future, their support for the present, it raised them above their fellowmen, and with it they warded off evil. The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial quantities, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory.” Linda’s next love was an idealist and a communist, schooled at Oxford. She reports to her cousin, “The worst of being a Communist is that the parties you may go to are—well—awfully funny and touching, but not very gay, and they’re always in such gloomy places…. Darling, I am being disloyal, but it is such heaven to have a chat after all these months. The comrades are sweet, but they never chat, they make speeches all the time.” The last love of Linda’s life was a French Duke, whom she met in Paris, who lived the life of a Casanova. His theory of the good life was “whatever one may be in politics, right, left, Fascist, Communist, society people are the only possible ones for friends…. Apart from the life of the intellect and the contemplative religious life, which few people are qualified to enjoy, what else is there to distinguish man from the animals but his social life?” The Radlett women produced their share of offspring, but children were never to get in the way of their life. During the Second World War, pregnant with her third child and with her two cousins equally pregnant, the novel’s narrator reports that the women “worked hard, mending and making and washing, doing any chores for Nanny rather than actually look after the children ourselves. I have seen too many children brought up without Nannies to think this at all desirable. In Oxford, the wives of progressive dons did it often as a matter of principle; they would gradually become morons themselves, while the children looked like slum children and behaved like barbarians.”
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