New light on Nancy
From Laura Thompson
Sir: Anne Chisholm (Books. 1 March) is of course entitled to her alarmingly low opinion of my book about Nancy Mitford, Life in a Cold Climate.
But she is not entitled to justify this opinion by condemning my book for its lack of 'new material'; this is actually inaccurate, not least because I make detailed reference to a large number of letters written by Nancy Mitford to the Voltaire scholar Theodore Besterman, a correspondence which was kindly made available to me by the Taylor Institution in Oxford, and which has not been fully examined in print before now. These letters do not, it is true, reveal to the world that Nancy was a secret alcoholic. What they do is something rather more subtle, which is to tell us a good deal about the way in which Nancy worked. This is very much the focus of my book, and my close study of all her writings is also 'new', in the sense that no previous biographer has done it.
A highly traditional biographer like Anne Chisholm may well feel an intense dislike for a book like mine which deviates from a fixed idea — set down by the Lord knows whom — of what 'biography' should be. Whether this gives her the right to destroy three years' work with quite such contempt is, however, another story.
Laura Thompson
London SE!
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