the pursuit of love nancy mitford review

“And it’s really about the emotional journey we’re going on with the girl who’s doing the watching and constantly measuring herself against this impulsively alive person she’s sort of in love with but often feels let down by.” “It’s a story where we’re watching one girl watch another girl,” she said, sitting at a cafe’s sidewalk table near her Brooklyn home.

The cautious Fanny (Emily Beecham) takes a more conventional route, and finds herself an intellectually frustrated stay-at-home wife and mother who worries that, in contrast to the reckless Linda, she has become prim.įor the three-part series, which is Mortimer’s directorial debut, Fanny is a more involved co-protagonist than she is in the novel, and Mortimer also chose to emphasize the way Fanny lives vicariously through Linda. In doing so, the British actress and writer found Mitford celebrating in Linda somebody who “isn’t scared of or fettered by the conventional rules of how to behave,” she said in a recent interview.Īt a time when women were expected to marry and then obey their husbands, Linda (played by Lily James in the show) becomes a sexually liberated social renegade who allows no obstacle, including propriety, to impede her search for romantic passion. Mortimer has adapted the book - which tells the divergent stories of Fanny and Linda, aristocratic English cousins and best friends coming-of-age between the two World Wars - for a sparkling new mini-series that comes to Amazon Prime Video on July 30. If you ask Emily Mortimer, there’s something inherently rock ‘n’ roll about Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel “The Pursuit of Love.”

The pursuit of love nancy mitford review