"“The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can't imagine why; but they do."(c)

 Nancy Mitford was born on 28 November 1904 in London, at 1 Graham Street (now Graham Place) in Belgravia, London, the eldest of six daughters of Lord Redesdale.

Nancy fell in love with three unsatisfactory men. The first, Hamish Erskine, was homosexual but her infatuation with him lasted five years. In 1933 she married Peter Rodd, a clever, delinquent bore,  the marriage was a failure; her husband was unfaithful and couldn't keep a job. They separated after the war and were divorced in 1958.
She is best remembered for her series of novels about upper-class life in England and France, particularly the four published after 1945; but she also wrote four well-received, well-researched popular biographies (of Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, and Frederick the Great).

  During the war she worked at Heywood Hill, the Mayfair bookshop, 10 Curzon Street,  which became a meeting place for London literary society and her friends. There she  met Gaston Palewski, a Free French officer and General de Gaulle’s chief of staff.
  Wartime love affairs were notoriously short-lived, but having met the love of her life, Mitford was disinclined to let him go, and he remained her great passion until her death in 1973, at his feet she laid all her passion and loyalty for over thirty years.   At the end of the Second World War she moved to Paris to be near him. The largely one-sided affair, which inspired the romance between Linda Talbot (née Radlett) and Fabrice de Sauveterre in Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love, lasted fitfully until Palewski's affair with and eventual 1969 marriage to  the Duchesse de Sagan.
  Mitford, scrupulously good at hiding her feelings, pretended not to mind, though the story persists that her death four years later, from Hodgkin’s disease, was the result of a broken heart.