“Christmas Pudding” - Nancy Mitford

🎄I was pointed in the direction of Mitford’s novels first by the reference in “The Last Bookshop in London,” and later upon reading “The Mitford Murders”. I was intrigued by the real-life character of Nancy Mitford, a member of the fashionable “Bright Young Things” generation of 1920s England. Unlike many of her literary peers, it seems Mitford wrote for money and pleasure rather than vaunted aspirations.


🎄CP is a riotous take on an English country Christmas. Mitford takes great pride in skewering aristocratic English country tropes. CP features a motley crew of characters - from an outdoorsy, hunt-obsessed matriarch, to a misunderstood author, to an aristocratic couple ever on the brink of insolvency. They find themselves at neighboring country estates for the holidays. Each character harbors their own comical secrets, and all are in various predicaments unknown to the others. Hijinks ensue.


🎄As a young, independent, working woman of aristocratic pedigree, Mitford is in a unique position to analyze the collision of love and respectability, of class and wealth. CP is light-hearted and amusing, but there is a vein of realism: her characters are resigned to the fact that they can either have love or wealth, but not both.

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