Nancy Mitford and gay characters

Nancy was the daughter of a “backwoods peer”, and one of family of aristocrats who were very well known, almost notorious, in British society in the 1920s and 1930s.  The family consisted of 6 daughters and one son.  Some of them sympathised with the fascist cause in the 30s and were friendly with Hitler and wished for the UK to join with Hitler and fight communism.  One daughter Jessica however became a Communist and married another young aristocrat who fought on the Red side during the Spanish Civil war.   Her sisters Diana and Unity were on the fascist side.  Diana married Oswald Mosley and Unity tried to kill herself when Germany and Britain were at war.

Nancy was somewhere in the middle on the political front.  She was mildly liberal as a young woman and tried her hardest to break away from the strict rule of her conservative father, Lord Redesdale, by going to Art School and trying to make a living writing novels and light journalism.  As she grew older she became more conservative, and she settled in France with a French Gaullist as her lover.

In her 20s she took part in social activities, but grew rather bored with the social round.  She fell in love with Hamish Erskine, a young gay aristocrat and seems to have blinded herself to his sexual nature and believed that they would marry.   They were engaged, but in the end, he grew fed up of trying to pretend he cared for Nancy as a woman and he broke off the engagement.  Nancy was nearing 30 and wanted to marry. So with a certain amount of desperation, she ended up marrying Peter Rodd, another rather lazy young man who was not likely to be a good provider.  Peter was said to be good natured but a terrible bore and incapable of holding down a job.  He didn’t have much family money behind him and Nancy ended up writing novels to support them.

Within a few years, the marriage was failing and Peter was unfaithful.   Nancy was struggling to keep up her optimistic viewpoint.
Word War II began and the divisions in the Mitford family were painfully exacerbated by it.  Nancy with Peter had done some refugee work in the South of France helping people who had escaped from Francoist Spain.  So she was ardently on the British side in the war and was shocked that Diana and Mosley were sympathetic to Nazism -even though both of them were willing to fight for England, when war was declared.  Nancy was truly sympathetic to the victims of fascism and was proud that Peter had joined up. 
Lady Redesdale, like Unity was not happy that Britain was at war with Germany, and she and Nancy disputed over this.   However Lord Redesdale did not agree with his wife.  He was an old fashioned Tory and regretted his brief sympathy with Germany and Hitler.  His wife continued to feel that Hitler wasn't so bad. 
 The elder Redesdales began to live apart although they remained married.  Lord Redesdale was unhappy about his 2 daughters who had involved themselves with the fascist cause.  

Nancy’s marriage improved for a time, while she and Peter were finding common cause over the war, but in due course, they began to spend time apart again.   Nancy began to do war work with the Free French in London, and through this work she met a young man who became her lover for a short time.  Peter turned up occasionally but spent most of his time with other women.   Then Nancy met Gaston Palewski, a Polish French officer, who was sympathetic with De Gaulle.  He was attracted to her, and she became his mistress.  She fell desperately in love with him, but for him, it was a light hearted wartime affair.

After the war, Nancy now aged 40, fell in love with France and decided to move there.  It was a big move for a woman approaching middle age but she convinced herself that France was a much nicer place than England.  She settled in Paris and continued her relationship with Paleswski,  though he made it clear that he did not want a permanent romance or marriage.  He was involved in politics on the Gaullist side and told her that they had to keep their affair very discreet and that he could never marry an English Protestant divorced woman.  He was however very openly involved with many other women. Nancy however continued to love him and excuse him for the constant infidelities.  She remained in France for the rest of her life, until the 1970s when she died of a painful cancer after many years of ill health and suffering.  She and Gaston never married.  But her love for him inspired her work. Eventually he married a woman who had given him a son, but who was divorced.  Nancy forgave him for this and they remained good friends to the end of her life. 

As a younger woman, she wrote light novels that were moderately successful about the “Bright young Things”.   After meeting Gaston, she began to write novels that were light and comedic but had a greater emotional depth.  They were more closely  based on her own family relationships.  Her father became “Fa” -the grumpy but lovable conservative backwoods, Lord Alconleigh.  And her siblings were portrayed as the crazy and charming Radlett family.   Linda, the heroine of “The Pursuit of Love” was partly based on her sister Diana’s earlier marital adventures and partly on Nancy’s own marriage and her affair with Gaston Palewski.   The novel and its successor “Love in a Cold Climate”, were extremely popular best sellers.
Some people don’t think highly of Mitford’s novels, that they are at best,  just light hearted froth about silly upper class characters with a conservative bias. But she was a sharp and witty writer, who, like Jane Austen, chose to write about the sort  of people she knew best, socialites rather than try writing about other classes.  And she was remarkably liberal for a woman born in Edwardian times, on the issue of homosexuality.  She had had a long standing engagement to a young man who was gay, and possibly, at that age did not fully understand his sexual orientation and that it meant that he was unlikely to truly wish to be married to her.  Later on, she portrayed characters such as Cedric Hampton, the gay aesthete who becomes heir to the Montdore title, with wit and sympathy. In her other novels, too, she is sympathetic to homosexuals, and tolerant and defends them against the idea that they are “sexually perverse”, saying that they “just prefer boys to girls”.