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A delightful comedy of manners --The Times
Product Description
Albert Gates, a surrealist painter of impeccable family, is greatly given to outrageous pranks; Jane Dacre finds him quite irresistible though the elder members of the shooting party are less enraptured. His victims include Lady Prague, whom he haunts disguised as the castle ghost, and General Murgatroyd, who will never willingly shake hands with a foreigner. Written in 1931, Highland Fling was Nancy Mitford s first published novel, and is the first time her irascible father appears as a character in one of her fictional plots, as the wrathful General Murgatroyd (and later as the volatile Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love). Combining physical humour and verbal sharpess, Highland Fling captures perfectly the high-society glamour of the decades immediately before and after World War II.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Three long-awaited Nancy Mitford novels (this one, "Wigs on the Green" and "Christmas Pudding") are finally and completely righteously back in print. Of course their style is somewhat embryonic in comparison to the slickness of her more famous books, but they're nevertheless cleverly written and great fun. Highland Fling has several memorable moments of riotous hilarity which resulted in howls of laughter, and this alone - for me - made it worthy of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a very early novel by Nancy Mitford. It is slight, silly and very of its time. It is also lovely to read because it is frothy and undemanding and funny. It is somewhat romantic, but more of a comedy of the social manners of the upper classes in the roaring twenties. If you are new to Mitford I would suggest starting with the classics, Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, as these are undoubtedly her masterpieces, but this is gentle and fun and those things in a novel are by no means to be sneezed at. I read it in a sitting and enjoyed every page.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Certainly NOT P.G. Wodehouse!
A very disappointing book! As a social study of the time, it can have a point perhaps, showing the generation problem between the WWI generation and the generation that believed... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Luthien Arnatuile
The way we were (if lucky enough!)
Wonderful, evocative, well written book. Plot doesn't matter but the feeling of the time does.
Published 20 months ago by annedixon
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