Recommendations
Books Like The Pursuit of Love
Eccentric English families, unsuitable marriages, and the comedy of romantic disaster
If The Pursuit of Love delighted you — Uncle Matthew's magnificent rages, Linda's hopeless romantic adventures, Fanny's dry observational voice, the Hons' cupboard — these eight novels share its comedy of manners, its portrait of the English upper class between the wars, or its wit about love and its consequences.
- 1Buy
Love in a Cold Climate
by Nancy Mitford
Fanny narrating the story of Polly Hampton, whose beauty and her mother Lady Montdore's social ambitions are working in opposite directions — Mitford's direct sequel returns to Fanny as narrator and to the same social world; slightly more satirical and slightly less elegiac than The Pursuit of Love, it is the obvious next read and one that most fans of the first novel prefer to read immediately after
- 2Buy
A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh
Tony Last's wife having an affair with the vapid John Beaver, leading to a chain of consequences that ends in the Amazon — Waugh's satirical masterpiece is the darker companion to The Pursuit of Love: the same English upper-class social world, the same comedy of romantic disaster, but where Mitford's comedy is ultimately warm and even elegiac, Waugh's is cold and the catastrophe is final
- 3Buy
Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym
Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman's daughter in her thirties, perpetually useful and wryly observant — Pym's comedy of manners is the closest non-Waugh companion to Mitford in its dry social observation and its narrator who sees more than the people around her suspect; where Mitford's narrator looks at an eccentric aristocratic family, Pym's looks at a Kensington flat and a parish church, but the observational mode is the same
- 4Buy
Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons
Flora Poste, a sensible young woman, descending on her eccentric rural cousins and rationalizing their gothic squalor — Gibbons's 1932 comic novel shares The Pursuit of Love's mode of a sensible observer entering a world of engagingly absurd chaos; both books are products of the same English literary culture of the 1930s and 1940s, and both use a female narrator of unusual composure as the vehicle for their comedy
- 5Buy
The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate
by Nancy Mitford
The omnibus edition containing both Mitford novels — the obvious companion purchase for readers who want to continue directly into the same world after finishing The Pursuit of Love; most editions are published together precisely because the two novels are best read as a pair
- 6Buy
Vile Bodies
by Evelyn Waugh
Adam Fenwick-Symes and Nina Blount trying to get married while the Bright Young Things careen around them — Waugh's second novel shares The Pursuit of Love's portrait of the young English upper class in the interwar years and its satirical attitude toward the social round of engagements and counter-engagements; lighter in tone than A Handful of Dust and the most direct Waugh companion to Mitford's social comedy
- 7Buy
I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith
Cassandra Mortmain, living with her eccentric family in a decaying English castle and falling in love, writing everything down in a journal — Smith's 1948 novel shares The Pursuit of Love's portrait of an unconventional English family, its female narrator of particular intelligence, and its combination of romantic comedy with genuine feeling; one of the most loved English novels of the twentieth century and a perfect companion
- 8Buy
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Charles Ryder's memories of his friendship with Sebastian Flyte and his love for Julia, and the Marchmain family's relationship to their Catholicism and their great house — Waugh's most ambitious novel is the elegiac companion to Mitford's romantic comedy: both are about a vanishing English world of great houses and aristocratic families, but where Mitford mourns it lightly, Waugh mourns it with the full weight of religious conviction
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