MITFORD, NANCY

1904–73, English novelist and biographer, b. London. She managed a London bookshop during World War II and moved to Paris in 1945. Mitford was born into the British aristocracy, which she satirizes in her novels, notably In Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949). Her writing is sophisticated, malicious, and captivating. Indeed, her boring, bigoted, illiterate lords and amoral, irresponsible ladies have taken on the qualities of myth. She also wrote biographies of Madame de Pompadour (1954) and Frederick the Great (1970).

See her letters (1993); correspondence with E. Waugh (1997), ed. by C. Mosley; memoir (1976) by H. Acton; biography (1986) by S. Hastings.

Mitford's sister Jessica Mitford, 1917–96, b. Gloucestershire, England, also a writer, is known for her witty and irreverent polemics. Her works include The American Way of Death (1963; rev. ed. 1998), a scathing exposé of American funeral homes; Kind and Usual Punishment (1973), a critical study of the brutality of American prisons; and The American Way of Birth (1992), an indictment of the overuse of cesarean sections.

See her autobiography, Daughters and Rebels (1960), and her memoirs of her early days as a Communist, A Fine Old Conflict (1977); see also J. Guinness, House of Mitford (1984), and M. S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (2002).

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