Lady Montdore, the manipulative presence who hovers over Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, is not so much unempathetic as anti-empathetic. Of an unattractive young woman whom she learns is training to become a vet, she remarks, in a rare moment of approval: “No point in cluttering up the ballrooms with girls who look like that, it’s simply not fair on anybody.” Nor is others’ misery likely to make much of an impression on her. “I love being so dry in here,” as she says while she’s being chauffeured to her stately home during a rainstorm, “and seeing all those poor people so wet”. It’s not that she’s a sensualist – at least not when the novel opens – but that no pleasure can be truly satisfying unless it is firmly located in a pecking order. What’s the point of dry for dry’s sake?
The social hierarchy that most preoccupies her is the one that she hopes her only child Polly (full name: Leopoldina) will top when she marries, a manoeuvre with which Lady Montdore is all too familiar, having begun life as Sonia Perrotte and wed her way out of the fate that might otherwise meet the daughter of a penniless country squire. She has certainly taken her social ascent seriously, devoting her life to keeping those beneath her in their place with “the charm of a purring puma”, working her servants to the brink of exhaustion to provide the fabulous comfort and entertainment on offer at Hampton, her country house, and developing an unbreachable carapace in the face of others’ disapproval. Her “rampant vulgarity” is legendary, and her “worldly greed and snobbishness, her terrible relentless rudeness, had become proverbial”; so disliked is she that people assume her origins might even be – the horror! – transatlantic.
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