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Highland Fling, by Nancy Mitford
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In Highland Fling—Nancy Mitford’s first novel, published in 1931—a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle, where bright young things play pranks on their stodgy elders until the frothy plot climaxes in ghost sightings and a dramatic fire.
Inspired in part by Mitford’s youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus, and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humor. Lighthearted and sparkling with witty banter, Highland Fling was Mitford’s first foray into the delightful fictional world for which the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate later became so celebrated.
With an Introduction by Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey.
- Sales Rank: #368219 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-09-24
- Released on: 2013-09-24
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“Highland Fling is a taster of coming delights. . . . It is the first time Mitford attempted to quantify and codify and explain the world of her beginnings, always seen with her wonderful, comic vision. . . . There is cruelty beneath the comedy, a kind of sharpness that bears testimony to the force of her judgment even when it is wrapped in the cotton wool of humour. But most of all, there is truth.” —from the Introduction by Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey
About the Author
Nancy Mitford, daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale and the eldest of the six legendary Mitford sisters, was born in 1904 and educated at home on the family estate in Oxfordshire. She made her debut in London and soon became one of the bright young things of the 1920s, a close friend of Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and their circle. A beauty and a wit, she began writing for magazines and writing novels while she was still in her twenties. In all, she wrote eight novels as well as biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XIV, and Frederick the Great. She died in 1973. More information can be found at www.nancymitford.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from the Introduction
In a sense, Highland Fling is a taster of coming delights. It was Nancy Mitford’s first novel, published in 1931 when she was still in her twenties, and among its pages the reader may find seeds of the characters that would so memorably people her later books, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, for both of which she is justly celebrated. General Murgatroyd is certainly the ancestor of Uncle Matthew, both descending, as they do, from Mitford’s own father, Lord Redesdale, who must surely rank as her principal source material throughout her career. I always enjoy his response when he was accused of discrimination. ‘I don’t discriminate,’ he spluttered indignantly. ‘I hate everybody.’ But alongside the splenetic General, there are clear traces of Linda Radlett in Jane Dacre, Lady Prague lays the groundwork for Lady Montdore, Albert Memorial Gates is a precursor of Cedric Hampton, and so on. But if it is fun to find the clues of what would come after, the book has its own merit in that this is the first time Mitford attempted to quantify and codify and explain the world of her beginnings, always seen with her wonderful, comic vision.
Admittedly, this world was not a hard place. Young couples live on nothing at all, highland castles are lent and borrowed, no one seems to have much in mind beyond some decent shooting and dinner at the club. Only Albert is engaged in anything remotely resembling a profession and that as a surrealist painter. Mitford’s men did not push pens or languish behind desks; her women spent their time gossiping and changing their clothes. Nor did they question the rules of a society that allowed them to idle away their days, or ask why they should be waited on hand and foot even when they hadn’t a penny to their name. But that is what makes this account of them a restful and hilarious read. It was a thoughtless age, perhaps, and even a selfish one, but without our moral smuggery which prompts every soap opera celebrity to veil their own self-obsession with much vaunted, anguished care for the environment or the survival of the whale. There is an honesty in that.
As a young woman, Nancy Mitford was madly, if quite unsuccessfully, in love with a Scottish aristocrat, Hamish St Clair-Erskine, and it is hard not to feel that Highland Fling may, in some ways, be a form of revenge after those wasted, tearful years in fruitless pursuit. How much time must she have spent in just such houses as Dalloch Castle, waiting for Hamish to love her, and how frustrating it must have been. Lord Craigdalloch himself, to say nothing of horsy Lady Brenda Chadlington or the intolerably dull Admiral Wenceslaus, all have the quality of being drawn from life, while the snobbish and philistine Lady Prague comes in for particularly savage treatment. ‘Why let her learn oils?’ said Lady Prague. ‘There are too many oil paintings in the world already. Let her do water colours. They take up much less room.’ Guided by Mitford’s sly description, we grasp at once why Lady Prague would be quite unable to resist Mrs Fairfax, an amoral bolter of the first order, because, during her many marriages, Mrs Fairfax has given birth to an English marquess and an Italian duke. ‘Dear Louisa,’ explains Lady Prague, ‘was always such a high-spirited girl, she can scarcely be blamed for her actions.’ But when others without so many connections in the ranks of the Peerage break her ladyship’s rules, there can be no mercy for them. The point is that Mitford knows these men and women. She knows how they work. She grasps their self-interest and their hypocrisy and their double standards. I would not say she never loves them, or some of them, but she knows them for what they are.
In Highland Fling, as always with this author, there is the vividness of personal experience in her work and this pre-war group do seem to embody exactly what a clever, quick-witted woman must have found so hard to endure about that oh-sopredictable life on the hill. It is a culture of watching others kill all day, getting ever more cold and wet before returning to freezing baths and bad dinners with boring people. Indeed, she writes with such relish that I am convinced the fate she metes out to the scene of their pleasures is one she wished on too many of such house parties in this unsatisfactory period of her own past. Because, for me, that is the key to Mitford’s genius: her intimate knowledge of this world and these people. Indeed, no one knew it—or certainly could articulate it—better. But, in her own way, even by this stage of her life, she had grown out of its limited values and, free as she was, she could afford to turn the torch of her own acerbic wit on a tribe who thought themselves the very acme of high life and high principle but were instead living in a foolish and largely pointless bubble, a bubble, what is more, that was soon to burst.
Of course there is cruelty here beneath the comedy, a kind of sharpness that bears testimony to the force of her judgement even where it is wrapped in the cotton wool of humour. But most of all, there is truth. And truth, as all the world knows, is the basis of great comedy.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Comedy of manners
By Damaskcat
This is the first Nancy Mitford novel I've read and I shall definitely be reading more. The book is a social comedy and has very little plot to speak of. A group of ill assorted people gather at a Scottish castle while the owners are away for some shooting on the moors. The author focuses on two couples - Sally and Walter and Jane and Albert. Sally and Walter have a cash flow crisis and eagerly accept an invitation from the owners of the castle to play host to the house party while they are unexpectedly abroad.
Sally and Walter invite Albert - middle name Memorial - to go with them. Albert is an artist and reasonably well off financially. Jane is invited by Sally partly with matchmaking intentions. The rest of the guests are amusing depending on your ability to set aside political correctness and accept that manners and morals were completely different when this book was first published.
For me the pleasure in reading the book came from the interaction between the characters and the acidic wit in the descriptions and situations. Pretensions are exposed to the cold light of day and people are shown to be far other than their outward appearances. I was reminded of Jane Austen at her most waspish as demonstrated in the novella `Lady Susan'. If you enjoy Jane Austen, E M Delafield and E F Benson then you will probably enjoy Nancy Mitford.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Mitford at her earliest (and nearly her funniest)
By Jay Dickson
HIGHLAND FLING is for the most part so accomplished that it's hard to believe it was Nancy Mitford's first novel: it shows already firmly in place her tremendous gift with witty dialogue and her lifelong love of juxtaposing the differing mindsets of the upper classes. Although it shows some structural weakness (or naivete) in that it takes until the fifth chapter for Mitford to introduce her main character Jane Dacre, once Jane enters the picture and the action moves from London to Scotland it never stops being funny.
The set-up involves two dizzy and constantly hard-up London socialities, Walter and Sally Monteath, being asked by Sally's titled aunt to care for her Scottish castle and their seasonal shooting guests where she and her husband the earl are out of the country. To make their stay (which will save them quite a bit of money) more palatable, Sally and Walter invite a few of their friends among the Bright Young Things, Jane and the surrealist painter Albert Gates, come with them. The humor depends on first glance on the generational differences between the elder shooting guests, Establishment monsters of conservativism addicted to hunting and fishing, and the Monteaths' friends, who are their mostly for gossip and aesthetic reasons (Albert, who has taken to calling himself Albert Memorial Gates, is so avant-garde that he has gone to the other extreme and become a devotee of Victoriana, of which the castle abounds but which was very much out-of-date among the Establishment by the time the novel was written). Much of the novel's humor depends on the clash between the aesthetics of the elder and younger generations, and the lengthy description of the "safe" bourgeois tastes of Lady Brenda Chadlington, the one figure who most floats between the two groups, won't be as funny unless you are firmly entrenched in the visual style of the period. HIGHLAND FLING goes beyond this, however, and like most of Mitford's novels engages with the political as well as the aesthetic: Albert's explicit denunciation of the Edwardian attitudes of the most aggressive of the elders, General Murgatroyd, that to the First World War makes this novel more than simply delicious froth.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Highland Fling
By S Riaz
Published in 1931, this is Nancy Mitford's first novel. Centred in her world of the aristocracy, the novel concerns young artist, Albert Gates, who returns to England from Paris to stay with his friend Walter Monteath and his wife Sally. The pair are suffering from Walter's complete inability to sustain a job or curtail his spending and are suffering severe financial problems. When Sally is asked to house-sit (or 'castle-sit') the family home of her aunt and uncle, they accept the offer with misgivings, but with the intention of cutting down their spending.
Dalloch Castle has several guests expected, who are looking forward to indulging in their usual sporting activities - notably shooting and fishing. Although Walter and Sally invite Albert and Sally's friend, Jane, they are outnumbered by those of the older generation, who view them with suspicion. Captain and Lady Chadlington, General Murgatroyd, Admiral Wenceslaus, Mr Buggins and Lord and Lady Prague, largely view these Bright Young Things and their outlandish behaviour with a very jaundiced eye indeed. The generation gap throws up all sorts of problems and humorous situations, plus there is a love affair to brighten up the trip and a whole host of fantastic characters. Nancy Mitford is obviously just getting into her stride with this first novel, but her sharp satirical wit is very much in evidence already. Many people deride her novels as aimed at a world which no longer exists and people who no longer matter and that may be true; but she wrote about the world she knew intimately and captured it perfectly. For me, she is one of the greatest comic writers and I look forward to reading her novels in the order she wrote them - reaquainting myself with those I love and discovering those I may have missed.
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