Biography: In London during the second World War, Nancy Mitford was asked to lecture on fire-watching and how to deal with incendiary devices. Then she was asked to stop. "Well you see," it was explained to her, "it's your voice. It irritates people so much, they said they'd like to put you on fire."
Over the intervening 60 years, a feeling of irritation towards Nancy Mitford, and her family, has probably become more widespread rather than diminished. When her two most successful novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, were televised by the BBC in 2001, even the company's own publicity material wondered "why in this age of equality would anyone want to read or watch the semi-biographical adventures of a self-confessed snob?" (With an attitude like that, no wonder the adaptations of the books were so poor).
Leaving aside whether or not Mitford was a "self-confessed snob", any work either by or about her begins with two disadvantages: although separated from our own by less than a century, the world it describes seems impossibly remote; and at the same time, for the past 50 years that world has been repeatedly and remorsely described, analysed, discussed - not least by the Mitfords and their various relatives and descendants. A new biography of Nancy Mitford will therefore most likely be greeted with groans instead of "shrieks" (a favourite Mitfordian word for indicating pleasure). That would be a pity because Laura Thompson's book, despite being too long and intermittently repetitive, is wonderful.
It might even encourage readers to appreciate Nancy Mitford's writing for its literary merits rather than simply as entertaining social history. Thompson takes the trouble to consider the Mitford prose style - "purely idiosyncratic" as Evelyn Waugh called it - through which, according to her new biographer, "Nancy was not attempting to be a satirist, she was simply relating things as she saw them", producing a vision that "is so clear as to seem almost skewed". Correctly, she perceives Mitford to have been a romantic whose greatest concern, expressed either obliquely or explictly through her writing was "how to live a sensible and happy life while accepting, and embracing, the irrationalities of love". It is surely no accident that the word love occurs in the titles of her two most successful novels and that both of these, for all their immediate zest are, as Thompson points out, suffused with a "slow and elegiac sadness". She also admiringly quotes the closing line of Mitford's best biography, Madame de Pompadour: "After this, a very great dullness fell upon the Chateau of Versailles". Until now, the vein of melancholy that runs through her books has tended to receive little notice. More attention is usually paid to Mitford's flippancy, as when she wrote after one of her sisters had suffered a miscarriage, "Poor Debo it must be wretched the worst thing in the world I should think - except losing a manuscript which I always think must be the worst". The casual cruelty of this remark is quite shocking and yet ought not to be taken too literally. In his diary for 1944, James Lees-Milne wrote that Nancy Mitford had told him "that her upbringing had taught her never to show what she felt".
So, here seems to be a writer for whom no injustice or misfortune fails to offer a comic opportunity (rather in the same way that, in her friend Evelyn Waugh's earliest novels, characters are killed off with fabulous indifference) and yet this is not a true representation of Mitford. A review of her 1960 novel, Don't Tell Alfred, in the Times Literary Supplement included a highly perceptive analysis of the author which noted her style had two characteristics "which, though honourable in life, are something of a handicap for a professional novelist. Fundamentally she is reticent, and does not care to intrude too closely upon her characters; and she is not at all malicious. These two together stand for a complete absence of that killer's instinct which is indispensable to the serious novelist".
Scarcely a satirist - Philip Toynbee once observed that her humour was not, as often suggested, the stuff of "polished wit" but more like "high buffoonery" - Nancy Mitford wrote as she thought and spoke: with an assumption that everyone else did likewise. This explains both the success, and weakness, of her historical biographies. Raymond Mortimer said that her book on Madame de Pompadour read "as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone" but he also suggested, indicating the drawback to this approach, "that she might not say Louis XV was perfect heaven three times on one page". Clearly such was her perception of the French king, but it might have been better left unarticulated.
Mitford's highly personalised vision of the world, present and past alike, has led to critical confusion between the books and the woman who wrote them. Specifically, there is a frequently-expressed belief that both the real Louis XV and the fictional Fabrice de Sauveterre in The Pursuit of Love represent versions of the writer's great love, Gaston Palewski, who, according to this interpretation, was a consistently malign influence on her life. At the time of the BBC dramatisation of her two novels, a profile of Mitford in the Sunday Times described her as Palewski's "tragic, ridiculous hanger-on" writing books in which "cleverness was overshadowed by an empty gaiety and brittle chill".
Thompson's view of Mitford's personal history is more complex and allows for the possibility that her circumstances were at the same time unfortunate and beneficial, simultaneously loathed and yet necessary, so that she could develop as a writer. She refers to Hilary Spurling's image of Nancy Mitford as "a real-life Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days, buried up to her neck in ruins and a brave, tight, twitchy smile pinned on her face". But she also includes Harold Acton's observation that "in her heart of hearts" Mitford was "a bachelor". Perhaps this is true of anyone who must wrestle with his or her art; John Julius Norwich remembered how, taking refuge in his parents' home to work on Love in a Cold Climate, Mitford would wail "no good darling, just won't come".
Of course, it did come in the end, but the anecdote proves that to achieve the necessary lightness, all soufflés, whether culinary or literary, demand a great deal of effort. Something else has to be neglected.
Robert O'Byrne is a writer and journalist. He has just completed a book on Dublin to be published later this year
Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford - A Portrait of a Contradictory Woman. By Laura Thompson Review, 432pp. £20