PRIVILEGE LOST: THE COUNTRY HOUSE, ARISTOCRACY AND ENGLISHNESS IN NANCY MITFORD'S NOVELS

This thesis explores the connections between Englishness and the English aristocracy in Nancy Mitford’s novels through a detailed analysis of their symbolic-cultural representation: the English country house. The main purpose of the present work, which combines literary, biographical, historical, geographical, architectural and social analysis, is the re-evaluation of Mitford’s undervalued literary production, which has been relegated to the category of conservative mass entertainment – also due to the thin veil of humour, satire, irony and sarcasm that characterises it – and its claims to cultural and historical relevance in interwar British fiction. Mitford's biography clearly influenced her narrative choices in terms of characters, settings and themes: her upper-class background, that of an English noblewoman who describes in detail, carefully examines and, at the same time, subtly lampoons her own social class, constructing her fictional characters as the perfect caricatures of aristocratic types, has been taken into consideration in the analysis of her novels since it not only lies at the basis of her literary output, but it also constitutes a unicum among the interwar English writers of country-house novels. The present thesis is structured in two main parts. The first introductory one pinpoints a few methodological directions, a specifically angled recognition of the studies that have so far dealt with Englishness, the myth of the English countryside and country house-fiction, and offer a detailed examination of the historical background to the decline of English country houses and of the landed classes in Britain in the interwar period. The second section features close reading and close observation, with the aim to explore the connections between the country house, aristocracy and Englishness in Mitford’s novels. Such connections characterise almost all her works, and trigger reflection on the reasons why and on the ways in which they are implicated in the narration: the declining English country house as a former repository of essential Englishness, the interwar English countryside still considered by the old aristocracy as a symbol of traditional values and as a bucolic refuge from the chaos of the modern world, the opposition between the declining Victorian and Edwardian nobility that hides behind the curtains of its country mansions, unwilling to accept the loss of its former power and prestige and the young, modern aristocrats and members of the Bright Young People of the 1920s and ’30s, who enjoy the pleasures of life between London and rural England, seen by them only as “commodified” landscape ready to be consumed, but which they are generally unable to fit into. Albeit a crude version of her more mature ones, her interwar novels in the strict sense, which are the object of analysis in chapter one and two, already reveal many similarities in the rural settings – a castle in the Scottish Highlands in "Highland Fling" (1931), small cottages and grand country houses in the Cotswolds both in "Christmas Pudding" (1932) and in "Wigs on the Green" (1935) –, and in the upper- and upper-middle-class characters (members of the old British nobility and of the Bright Young People). Mitford’s most famous novels, "The Pursuit of Love" (1945) and its companion volume, "Love in a Cold Climate" (1949), which were written during and after World War II, mainly focus “on the powerful cultural image of the English country house”, celebrating on the surface “a conservative, largely upper-class view that appealed to a nation devastated by war and to later generations holding fast to a particular notion of Englishness amid great historical and social change”, but in fact concealing “a sharply critical study of a declining upper class, incapable of maintaining its traditional feudal role as legal and moral authority” (Kawano 2017: 13). The fourth chapter, which takes into account Mitford’s two post-war ‘French’ novels, "The Blessing" (1951) and "Don’t Tell Alfred" (1960), accesses a seemingly different field of analysis, at the cross-road between the English and the French cultural spheres. However, as I show, the remarkable shift from England to France, from Englishness to Frenchness, from the English to the French nobility, which coincides with Mitford’s move to Paris (and later to Versailles), is only apparent, since, besides the presence of some very English characters of her previous novels, the accurately portrayed country houses and estates of the French aristocracy in Provence still present a great deal of fictional similarities with their English counterparts, thereby becoming a sort of literary transposition onto French soil of England’s great mansions. Finally, it can be observed that the thread of connections between Englishness, the aristocracy and its ancestral element, the country house, runs through all Mitford’s novels, which, despite being largely ignored by the academic world, have come closest to the best-selling romances in their use of the “shimmering gauze of that aristocratic myth” (Wessels 1992: 320): a myth, which still holds and commands the attention of the modern reading public due to the idea that the upper-classes manage, in a way, to “answer a universal desire for personification of the heroic” (Ibidem, 360), and which is never objectified by Mitford thanks to her piercing humour.