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The Pursuit of Love, a limited series now streaming on Amazon, is the directing debut of award-winning actress Emily Mortimer. Set primarily in England during the first half of the 20th century, it focuses its eye on two very different cousins; the passionate, wild one (Lily James) and the staid, sensible one (Emily Beecham). The story follows these two besties as they live, love, and come of age.
The Pursuit of Love is certainly a work of fiction, but it is also based on literary source material, namely a novel by Nancy Mitford of the same name. According to Decider’s Meghan O’Keefe, much of the plot and characters were ripped directly from the author’s real life.
“While there aren’t direct one-to-one correlations between Linda, Fanny, and the Mitford sisters, The Pursuit of Love borrows from a lot of the family’s wilder stories. Life at Alconleigh was modeled after the Mitfords’ childhood at their ancestral home of Asthall Manor. (The Hon club is actually a focus of Nancy’s sister Jessica Mitford’s own memoir Hons and Rebels.) Nancy’s best-loved novels loosely fictionalized the outsized personalities of her family and their radical choices in the early 20th century. The Mitford sisters were society favorites in the ’30s and ’40s, but they weren’t as well known for their partying as for their radically different choices of political parties. Nancy and her sister Jessica evolved into left-leaning writers. Jessica, in particular, was an all-out Communist who ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War and forge a career as an investigative journalist.”
In addition, two other Mitford sisters were well known Nazi sympathizers, and the storyline of Linda’s first marriage closely adheres to these details.
So why not pick up The Pursuit of Love now and get your summer reading on? You can nab it now on Amazon, starting at $11.51 for paperback and $11.99 for the Kindle edition.
