"Christmas Pudding" and "Pigeon Pie"

Two of Nancy Mitford's novels, "Christmas Pudding" and "Pigeon Pie" have been re-released in one paperback volume with an introduction by Jane Smiley.  Nancy is one of the 6 well-known Mitford sisters and she is the eldest born to Lord and Lady Redesdale.

"Christmas Pudding" is similar to "Highland Fling" in that a group of "characters" are together in one area over the Christmas holiday.  Paul Fotheringay, our sometime hero, is there under false pretenses as a tutor to the son of the Bobbins family so he can gain access to some papers he wants to use to write a book about a Bobbins' ancestress.  While there he falls in love with Philadelphia Bobbin, his pupil's older sister, but there is a slight complication because she has already received a proposal of marriage that she has yet to accept.  What to do?  Paul is penniless and her mother is likely to cut her off without an allowance if she marries him while her other suitor is totally in sync with what her mother would approve of.  The course of true love runs crooked in this book and with some challenges along the way.  Will love or practicality win out?

"Pigeon Pie" was written in late 1939 as war was looming in Europe and Mitford wrote it as a satire but maybe with poor timing.  Her heroine, Sophia Garfield, is married but both she and her husband have chosen to remain married - her for economic reasons and he because she is a more suitable hostess than his mistress.  She, too, is having an affair with an old friend and both lovers are in and out of the household with the mistress currently residing openly there.  As I have found in Mitford's previous books, this one, too, is full of rather interesting (or in some cases absurd) characters.  Sophia inadvertently gets caught up in uncovering a conspiracy while doing her bit for the war effort.

Although I didn't find either of these books a quick read -- at least not like my sitting down with a good mystery and not being able to put it down -- but they were amusing and give a glimpse of English life during the times they were set in.  pazt