Nancy Mitford’s novel, set in 1930s England, has been adapted by Emily Mortimer into a mini-series that explores expectations for women then and now.
If you ask Emily Mortimer, there’s something inherently rock ‘n’ roll about Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel “The Pursuit of Love.”
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. 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.
At 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. 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.
A roman à clef, Mitford’s novel affectionately memorialized her privileged upbringing as the eldest of the six socialite Mitford sisters — whose rebellious antics scandalized the establishment — and breezily satirized the progress of Diana into fascism, Unity into Nazism and Jessica into Communism. Linda is a composite of several of the Mitford sisters, including Nancy.
For 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.
“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. “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.”
In one scene Mortimer invented, Fanny is returning to England after she and her two companions have failed to extricate Linda from her new life as the kept woman of a roguish French duke, Fabrice (Assaad Bouab), where she is, finally, ecstatically happy. Fanny denounces Linda’s latest risky adventure, saying “She’s living as a high-class prostitute, and damn the consequences.” This peevishness irks Lord Merlin (Andrew Scott of “Fleabag”), Linda’s bohemian former mentor, who dryly retorts: “We can’t all experience the domestic bliss” that Fanny has achieved.
“And then, of course, Fanny has to go home and think to herself, ‘Is this really domestic bliss?’” Mortimer said. Fanny loves her husband Alfred (Shazad Latif), a staid Oxford don, and he adores her, but household drudgery, his grousing — about such infractions as Fanny confusing the jam and marmalade spoons — and the grisly demands of motherhood have extinguished their romantic spark. The fireworks Linda clearly enjoys with Fabrice means there is some envy in Fanny’s discomfort with her cousin’s arrangement.
Presenting the two cousins as foils for one another in this way allowed Mortimer to examine the limited life choices available to women of Fanny and Linda’s class and era, and the role of sexuality in their searching for meaning and happiness.
“There’s so much shame and pain around sexuality, even now, that it’s important for women to express themselves sexually, as Linda does, in a way that feels right to them,” she later wrote in an email.
When she was on set, Mortimer had conversations, she said, with young women on the show’s production teams who said that Linda’s experience of passionately going after what she wanted and it being deemed unacceptable really resonated with them.
Those young women still feel like “you have to be a good girl on some level and not be selfish or indulgent,” Mortimer said, a parallel to the social norms of Fanny and Linda’s world.
“Being made to feel ashamed about what we want for hundreds of years has confused us,” she added, speaking of women in general.
For Laura Thompson, the author of the Nancy Mitford biography “Life in a Cold Climate,” Linda is not a tragic figure, despite her many disappointments, and especially considering the context of her time.
“Nancy was an independent career woman who wrote wonderful books, but one of her sisters said to me, ‘Faute de mieux — much better to have a husband and children,’” Thompson said.
“That viewpoint is anathema to many women today,” Thompson continued, “but what we have is choice. Linda has to forge a path that makes choices for her, even though she rocks societal norms and upsets her parents.”
In the show, the choices available to women crystallize into three options: follow love no matter what, like Linda, be a “Sticker,” like the responsible Fanny, or a “Bolter,” like Fanny’s estranged mother, who got that nickname thanks to her habit of coldly fleeing from her husbands.
Played by Mortimer, The Bolter is cheerfully oblivious of her pariah status, the emotional damage she’s caused Fanny and her insensitivity. “Don’t let your children get in the way of your life, darling,” she plummily urges her perplexed daughter when they reconnect. “You didn’t get in the way — I had a wonderful life!”
When Linda abandons her infant daughter in a generational mirroring of Fanny being left by The Bolter to be raised by her aunt, Fanny is furious with her.
In playing Linda, James saw “a dangerousness in her that reminded me of addiction and a need for self-sabotage.” The character’s story “felt like such a battle to me, and it’s so upsetting that she tries to fulfill herself through her relationships with men,” the actress said in a phone interview. “Not being educated, Linda’s only choice is to fall in love and marry or stay at home with her parents.”
Linda’s struggles to find and understand herself — sexually and otherwise — within socially constructed limits are encapsulated by a line she says to Fanny, which Mortimer paraphrased from Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex.” Deep in a fresh crisis, Linda laments that “sometimes I don’t think we’re born women at all — it’s like our wings get clipped and then everyone’s so surprised when we don’t know how to fly.”
“Lily and I loved that line,” Beecham, who plays Fanny, said in a video interview, for the way it succinctly explains the restrictive social structures into which the cousins were born. Linda’s wings were brutally clipped in childhood by her father — Fanny’s dreaded Uncle Matthew (Dominic West) — a violent, belligerent misogynist who (after the Mitford patriarch Lord Redesdale) denies his daughters educations because he deems women fit for marriage and childbearing only. Linda rushes into her first unsuitable marriage as the only conceivable way of escaping her father’s tyranny.
Mortimer first read “The Pursuit of Love” when she was a teenager. Her father, the writer John Mortimer, also gave her “Hons and Rebels,” Jessica’s 1960 memoir of the Mitfords’ childhoods.
“Dad was obsessed with that book,” Mortimer said. “I remember a story he was always quoting from it. Whenever the reprobate Mitford sisters were asked by their desperate mother to sit with pens and paper and write down how they’d economize for a household on 200 pounds a year, Nancy without fail would write ‘£199: flowers.’”
Mortimer delights in that story, she said, because it’s a perfect rejection of “old-fashioned patriarchal preconceptions about how women should be — organized, sensible, good, selfless.” She added, “it’s punk rock behavior in my opinion.” In the mini-series, Linda’s mother humorlessly says Nancy’s quip to convey Linda’s unruliness to Lord Merlin.
Mortimer comments on this rebellious streak through the show’s soundtrack, which includes tracks from Sleater-Kinney, New Order and Cat Power, since “the songs of the ’30s weren’t sexy or dangerous enough,” she said.
Overall, though, Mortimer sees the themes of liberation and self-discovery for women at the center of “The Pursuit of Love” as far from new quests.
Fanny reads several books by Virginia Woolf in the show, and over email, Mortimer quoted a 1931 speech by Woolf that grew into a book about the sexual lives of women. In the speech Woolf described how she had to rid herself of the influence of the pure, self-sacrificing phantom of the ideal Victorian wife described in the popular 19th-century poem “The Angel in the House.” Killing this paragon, Woolf wrote, gave her back her own mind, and “was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”
Fanny has to embolden herself “to kill the Angel of the House, too,” Mortimer said. Linda’s exercise of her sexual freedom has already dealt the angel a deadly blow.
“To me, admittedly a woman in her forties and a born people-pleaser, all this feels relevant,” she said.
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