Welcome to Mitfordiana, the newsletter about Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca, Debo, and me. This is the first installment of a new series, “Nancy’s Novels, in Order.” You can find my commenting policy here.
My used copy of Highland Fling, which I ordered off Amazon (sorry), has an introduction by Julian Fellowes and an inscription inside the front cover to the effect that the previous owner read it on a transatlantic flight in December 2013. These two things tell you pretty much everything you need to know about Highland Fling: it is a perfect novel for airplane reading, and Julian Fellowes is trying to replicate Nancy’s style and failing.
The previous owner’s markings—Judy; she used a blue ballpoint—pause in the middle of chapter 7, which I take to mean is when she fell asleep on her flight, which is a shame, because chapter 7 describes the shoot at a shooting party in the Scottish Highlands, and is among the funniest sequences in the novel. Our heroine Jane finds herself made to walk several miles in the damp and the cold in a men’s Burberry coat that is much too big for her, and naturally the only other house guests she knows, her friends, the bohemian couple Sally and Walter, and their friend (and Jane’s love interest), the surrealist artist Albert, have chosen to stay behind until lunch.
“I expect I shall be very ill after this,” she thought. “I shall probably die, after lingering for some weeks; then perhaps they will be sorry.” And tears of self-pity and boredom welled up in her eyes. When the drive was over, they all began to walk towards the hut where luncheon was prepared. They were not obliged to keep in a straight line with each other, in order to put up game for the men, who carried their guns and let them off from time to time. “Keep up please, Miss Dacre. Keep in line, please, or you’ll be shot, you know.” Jane thought that it seemed almost uncivilised to threaten an acquaintance that she must keep up or be shot, but she said nothing and struggled, fairly successfully, not to be left behind. As the result of this further misery one tiny bird was added to the bag.
The people rounding out the house party seem horribly old to Jane, Sally, Walter, and Albert, though the oldest is probably sixty at most. They are mostly stock characters: the conservative retired general, the unhappy earl and countess, a male historian on his own whose main function is to tell anecdotes from Scottish folklore, and so on.
At one point, the general tries to ask Walter if Albert, who spends much of his stay in Scotland photographing objets d’art for a book on Victorian house decor, “were an aesthete. Walter looked puzzled and said he hoped so, he hoped they all were.” This remark comes on page 58 of my copy, and still, by page 120, we’re meant to believe Albert is straight enough to be capable of falling in love with Jane? I don’t know if this is a failing on Nancy’s part, exactly, once we remember that she was only twenty-six and very unhappy in her love life when she wrote the book, but it does keep you conscious that some fiction is, well, complete fiction. To be clear, this is fine! Sometimes unbelievability is a treat; that’s what makes some books better for teaching English 101 and some books better for reading on an overnight flight.
Most of Highland Fling’s characters are only too obviously caricatures of people Nancy knew. Fellowes’s introduction is a fairly standard mapping of the characters to members of Nancy’s social circle, as well as a sketch of how this first effort presages the characters that would later make her famous. This is pretty rote and boring, as far as Mitfordian criticism goes, but Fellowes points out that Nancy’s success with this formula, here and later, was because she knew exactly what she was writing about.
She herself did attend many horrible shooting parties at horrible cold houses filled with horribly old people, waiting for an eligible lord to marry her. Of course, in real life, her chosen lord (Hamish St. Clair-Eskine; what a name!) was too gay to actually commit to marrying her, and there is a strong element of wish fulfillment in the way the novel proceeds: the horrible house burns down, Albert proposes to Jane and has a successful first London exhibition, and Sally and Walter find out they are expecting a baby.
Despite this whiff of earnest longing, Highland Fling doesn’t take its conclusion too seriously. We are still meant to laugh at the way the happy ending comes about. Falling in love and getting married is cliché, but it’s fun, and that’s what matters. The big shrug of the ending is almost exactly the opposite of the ends of the kinds of house party Fellowes made his name writing. I have found that if you think too hard about the parallels between Gosford Park (2001) and Highland Fling, your head will start spinning, never mind the murders. Fellowes also knows the world of the British upper class intimately, but I don’t think I realized quite how much until I reviewed his Wikipedia page while writing this and learned that his father’s given names were, honest to God, “Peregrine,” “Edward,” and “Launcelot.”
Unfortunately, pedigreed or not, I don’t think Fellowes’ work, in his novels or screenplays, is anywhere near as funny as Nancy’s: Downton Abbey (2010-2015) had maybe two good quips in the first season and then promptly devolved into unhappy froth. That story’s moralizing tendencies eventually overshadow whatever delight we might have originally found in the fancy clothes and big house. Nancy’s talent for keeping the delight in the froth, on the other hand, only grew after Highland Fling, and we shall explore this more in the coming weeks.
In tearing haste,
Diana