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DAUGHTERS AND REBELS (284 pp.)-Jessica Mitford-Houghton, M/ffif/n...
...English are said to dearly love a lord, and the second Lord Redesdale is there to prove that they dote on a dotty peer-especially if he has six daughters, mostly zany, mostly blonde. An impressive photograph of the six Honorable Misses Freeman-Mitford, in their ironclad British tweeds, appears in this autobiography by one of their number. An industrious, middle-aged newspaper reader with total recall would be able to attempt a quiz about every blessed one of them, roughly thus...
...years ago Britain's Nancy Mitford wittily divided the social scene into U (for Upper Class) and non-17. Things are not that simple in the U.S., and in Author Packard's scheme there are Real U and Semi-U, both belonging to the college-bred "Diploma Elite"; then there are the "Supporting Classes,'' in turn subdivided into Limited-Success. Working Class and Real Lower (in his definitions, Packard rarely gets much more precise than to say that the Diploma Elite consists of "the big, active, successful people who pretty much run things" ). This structure, asserts...
Flawed and fragile early novels are often like youthful snapshots: a source of faint discomfort to the author, a delight to the doting fan, and a revealing glimpse into the past. Two such novels have now been issued in the U.S., one by Nancy Mitford, the British author (Love in a Cold Climate) who hates Americans, and the other by Christopher Isherwood, the British author (Prater Violet) who became one. The first is worth noting because of the surprisingly naive notions of its adult author, the second because it marks the jumping-off point in a talented young writer...
Medals & Marks. Nancy Mitford's Pigeon Pie (British Book Centre; 186 pp.; $2.95) was first published in 1940, and shows it. The book is a gay little farce about the early days of the war, and to Author Mitford, in that innocent year, war was something tiresome that men did. She wrote merrily: "England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. Then Italy's Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn't play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain's Nanny said she had internal troubles...