Today is the birth-day of the English writer Nancy Mitford . . . Today is the birthday of novelist, biographer, and essayist Nancy Mitford (1904) (books by this author), born in London. She was unapologetically aristocratic, but that didnt stop her from satirizing her own class. Her parents were illiterate, and anti-education; she and her five younger sisters called their father Old Subhuman. Mitford wrote: I grew up as ignorant as an owl, came out in London and went to a great many balls. ... Here I met various people who were not ignorant at all — I made friends with the sort of people which included Messrs. Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Sir Maurice Bowra and the brilliant Lord Berners. Very soon I became an intellectual snob. I tried to educate myself, read enormously and wrote a few indifferent novels. She published her first novel, Highland Fling, in 1931. She also wrote four biographies, and served as a regular columnist for the Sunday Times. She wrote a controversial essay on upper- and non-upper-class grammar called The English Aristocracy (1954). She intended the essay on U and non-U English to be a light-hearted tease, but it served to cement her reputation as a snob. (With thanks to Almanac & Garrison Keillor)
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 23:46:58 +0000
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