The Pursuit of Love
Mitford's comic masterpiece about the Radletts, the most gloriously chaotic aristocratic family in English fiction. Fundamentally a love story: Linda's serial heartbreaks, and then her luminous final love, told by a narrator who worships her. Brilliant and sharp, funny and then unexpectedly devastating.
Every man Linda falls for is weak, awful, or both, and more than one reader reads the pattern as the book’s real subject, intentional or not. Some find Linda herself curdles across the story into someone “self-absorbed and empty-headed,” undercutting any impulse to root for her. Untranslated French dialogue scattered through the text breaks the flow for readers who don’t read the language, and one listener calls out “narrator’s French pronunciation was atrocious.” Readers unfamiliar with the real Mitford family say the satire, and Uncle Matthew’s stranger mannerisms, go over their heads without that context. A later complaint holds that the story “degenerates in the latter half,” with Linda’s final relationship arc landing as unconvincing rather than earned. At least one reader dismisses the whole comic engine as “totally unbelievable and just silly” rather than genuinely clever.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
