How Nancy Mitford’s True Life Story Inspired the Drama of ‘The Pursuit of Love’

The Pursuit of Love on Prime Video has all the makings of a classic British period drama. There’s a fashionable heroine, handsome suitors, wild scandals, and gorgeous manor estates. But is The Pursuit of Love also based on a true story? The Nancy Mitford novel the Lily James series is based upon is often considered to be “semi-autobiographic.” What exactly does that mean? Well, obviously The Pursuit of Love is fiction, but many of its wilder plot details and most profound characters were stolen from Nancy Mitford’s real life. It is a glimpse of what life felt like for one of the legendary Mitfords.

The Pursuit of Love focuses on two cousins and close best friends, Linda Radlett (Lily James) and Fanny Logan (Emily Beecham). Fanny narrates the story and explains that Christmases for her were defined by visited her Uncle Matthew and the Radletts at their decrepit estate Alconleigh. While Fanny follows a pretty straightforward trajectory in life, following the rules and settling down with a kind scholar (Shazad Latif), Linda throws all caution to the wind and follows passion. She first marries, against her family’s wishes, a handsome, right-wing politician. That marriage is immediately a disaster. Then, after wasting seven years partying with the “Bright Young Things” of London, she falls hard for a young Communist named Christian Talbot (James Frecheville). She divorces her husband, causing a scandal, and runs away to Southern France to volunteer aid in the Spanish Civil War. Ultimately, Linda winds up in Paris with a new lover before World War II brings her back the UK, and more tragedy.

While there aren’t direct one-to-one correlations between Linda, Fanny, and the Mitford sisters, The Pursuit of Love borrows from a lot of the family’s wilder stories. Life at Alconleigh was modeled after the Mitfords’ childhood at their ancestral home of Asthall Manor. (The Hon club is actually a focus of Nancy’s sister Jessica Mitford’s own memoir Hons and Rebels.) Nancy’s best-loved novels loosely fictionalized the outsized personalities of her family and their radical choices in the early 20th century. The Mitford sisters were society favorites in the ’30s and ’40s, but they weren’t as well known for their partying as for their radically different choices of political parties. Nancy and her sister Jessica evolved into left-leaning writers. Jessica, in particular, was an all-out Communist who ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War and forge a career as an investigative journalist.

If that sounds slightly familiar, that might be because both Linda and her little sister’s storylines crib from this. But Nancy also had her Linda-esque moments. She spent years pining after Hamish St Clair Erskine, a younger, flamboyant man who was gay and basically everything her staunchly conservative father would reject. (Sound a bit like Lord Merlin to you? ) When that eventually fell apart, she had a brief, ill-fated marriage that ended rather quick. Like Linda, she didn’t initially have success in love and eventually found her way to Paris, where she lived out her days, becoming a best-selling novelist and biographer.

However, Nancy Mitford didn’t just borrow from her family for the romantic parts of The Pursuit of Love. Linda’s first marriage to the Nazi-sympathizing Tony Kroesig is obviously influenced by the most infamous Mitford sisters: Diana and Unity. The two are notorious for buddying up with Adolf Hitler and openly flaunting Fascism in Great Britain. Nancy briefly flirted with their politics before turning fully anti-Fascist. Nancy eventually spied on Diana and her husband to British Intelligence during World War II, prompting the two’s detainment. Unity was an all-out Nazi who tried to commit suicide after Hitler’s death to follow her friend and idol to the grave. It was…a lot.

The Pursuit of Love was published in 1945, which means the wry and witty Nancy Mitford was still probably grappling with what this all meant for her and her family. Her novel, interestingly, is less about the larger global implications than the smaller, intimate ones. How did politics drive families apart? How could they have sparked romances? And through it all, could two tightly-bound women who chose different lifestyles still be friends and family?

The Pursuit of Love is emphatically a work of fiction, but it reflects the joys and sorrows of a real woman who had a front row seat to some of the most tumultuous times in modern history.

Where to stream The Pursuit of Love