Life in a Cold Climate by Laura Thompson

Author:Laura Thompson [Thompson, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784082635
Publisher: Head of Zeus

8

Within three weeks, The Pursuit of Love made Nancy more money than the rest of her books put together: £798. Within six months it made £7,000. Within a year it sold 200,000 copies. The novel was an instant sensation: it absolutely hit the spot, and the remarkable thing was that this happened pretty much by word of mouth. Although publicised to an extent, the book’s popularity spread from person to person, like pollen. An equivalent success today would be on chat shows, in supermarkets, a continual source of newspaper articles (‘Are Frenchmen Really Better Lovers?’ ‘Should Child-Hunting be Banned?’ ‘Are You a Bolter?’). It would be overhyped like the silliest piece of female fiction (‘The Hon. Bridget Jones’s Diary’). Linda would be portrayed as what she always threatens to become but never does: a generic man-hunter, a symbol of every woman’s longing for love, fulfilment and the Duke of Rightshire.

But would The Pursuit of Love succeed so wildly, were it to be published today? What would certainly be relished is its extraordinary gift of immediacy, the direct and intimate voice, the hotline to the anxious banalities of the female psyche (‘I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection... it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, through vanity, but much more often from a fear that all is not as it should be’). Then there is its faith in the redemptive power of love, its romantic realism, qualities that still underpin ‘women’s’ books despite the rise of neo-feminism. In other ways, however, Nancy’s novel is completely different to any contemporary counterparts. Its cultural landscape is literary rather than journalistic, Evelyn Waugh rather than Cosmopolitan. Despite the modern technique of ‘racontez, racontez’, the book is a conceived and constructed thing, rather than two hundred pages of jolly spiel: ‘LINDA: V bd day today. Tony (bliss, swoon) rang but Farve (boo, hiss) picked up, ultra-disaster. Binged on jugged hare, 3 hlpgs stewed prunes (450 cals?). Gloucs. the absolute End.’

The Pursuit of Love is still adored for its autobiographical content and its ‘unwriterly’ style: in that sense, it is modern. What would probably go against the book, were it to be published today, is that it is set so shamelessly, so non-judgmentally, among the aristocracy. Nancy could bring the most socially remote member of the upper-classes to instant life, but there is a convention nowadays that posh people cannot be quite real. In fact Nancy was increasingly accused of uppishness during her own lifetime (‘I don’t like snobs,’ said a member of an Audience Research Report after her starchy appearance on BBC television in 19571). The world, as she knew, had grown inimical to her kind. Her compelling charm began to be seen as something false, fake, a music hall turn almost (‘The U Girl from Kew’). But she was lucky; she made it under the wire, a fugitive aristo embraced by the populist fold. A few years later and she might have been consigned to the oblivion of an unvisited stately home with its roof caving in.

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