Plus all those great accents.įanny is raised by her Aunt Emily (Annabel Mullion) after her mother - “too beautiful and gay to be burdened with a baby,” referred to only as “The Bolter” and played by Mortimer - left her father and town this gives her the advantage of schooling denied her cousins.

Television Keep calm and watch British TV: An expert recommends 40 shows to get you startedįrom slapstick comedy to snooty stoicism, British television is a soothing escape from troubled times. (Nancy Mitford was none of those.) Their father, whose literary reconstruction, Fanny’s Uncle Matthew, played here by a thundering Dominic West, was a blustery, violent xenophobe who didn’t believe women should be educated and is pictured hunting his children like foxes for fun. The novels took details from Mitford’s own famously unusual, semi-toxic family, copious enough to accommodate fascists, a muckracking journalist and a duchess among its seven siblings. Mitford’s (partial) alter ego is not her narrator, but her narrator’s subject, Fanny’s cousin Linda Radlett (Lily James), “a wild and nervous creature full of passion and longing,” in a rush to live and going about it wrong. The new production, which sticks to the first book - with a few importations from the second - is the grandest of the three, the most stylish, whimsical, energetic, broad and modern it is a case of 2021 looking back 80, 90 years, with a contemporary opinion about how things were, and are.

The novel has been adapted for television twice before, in 19, in combination with (and under the name of) Mitford’s following novel, “Love in a Cold Climate,” which takes place in the same time frame and features the same narrator, Fanny Logan, splendidly played here by Emily Beecham. It begins streaming Friday on Amazon Prime.

Emily Mortimer, the actor, has written and directed and plays a supporting part in a lively adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel “The Pursuit of Love,” a tale of two cousins set between the World Wars.

The bolter pursuit of love