5/31/2023 0 Comments Love in a cold climate novelBy contrast, English novels condemn women who seek erotic fulfillment outside marriage. Mitford’s comic representation of mistresses belongs to the French novelistic tradition, insofar as the role of the mistress is not morally censured and insofar as the role combines intellect, humor, autonomy, and pleasure. She wrote lighthearted biographies of Madame de Pompadour (mistress of Louis XV) and Madame du Châtelet (mistress of Voltaire) as learned women who make Eros compatible with disillusioned savoir faire. Mitford, an avowed admirer of all things French, models extramarital affairs like Polly’s on prototypes in eighteenth-century French history and literature. As the novel ends, Polly remains married to Boy and takes a lover. One’s spouse need not be one’s erotic partner, as Polly Hampton in Love in a Cold Climate discovers after her disappointing marriage to Boy Dougdale. Both novels represent marriage as a convenient means of uniting business interests or consolidating bloodlines but not as a suitable means of accommodating desire. In Nancy Mitford’s two novels about the comedies of Eros, The Pursuit of Love (1945) and its sequel Love in a Cold Climate (1949), marriage has no necessary relation to love.
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