Weekend Deviation – The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

Penguin Classics keep on rolling out the goodies – their latest? The Letters of Nanct Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. Blurb below as usual, I’m going back to finishing them.

Gossipy, witty and wickedly amusing, The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh follows the lives of the two writers from wartime London and Croatia (where Evelyn was posted – mostly, it seems, to smoke cigars and read the books Nancy sent him) to Paris and Somerset in the 1960s. They swap news of friends, tease one another mercilessly and criticize each other’s work: ‘One dreadful error’, reports Nancy on reading an advance copy of Brideshead Revisited, ‘Diamond clips were only invented about 1930; you wore a diamond arrow in your cloche.’ Their correspondence is unfailingly entertaining and sometimes touching; apparently they got on better on paper than in person. ‘My two eldest children are here and a great bore’, Evelyn complains in 1946. ‘Don’t be depressed’, Nancy responds, ‘Children are generally either prigs or gangsters & always dull & generally ugly’.