Wigs on the Green.
Mitford, Jessica. Wigs on the Green. London: Thornton Butterworth, Ltd., 1935. 1st Edition.
Nancy Mitford's third novel, and a genuine rarity, especially in the dust jacket. This was the book with which she really began to hit her stride as a chronicler of the manners and mores of the English upper crust -- her people. "Write what you know," they say, and above all Nancy knew her five sisters -- Bright Young Things one and all, bound by DNA but otherwise about as variegated as any bunch of well-bred English girls could be, especially when it came to politics. They ranged from Jessica on the left -- the family's "red sheep," a committed communist from her 'teens -- to Diana and Unity, Nazi sympathizers and then some, on the extreme right. By most accounts a contrarian from the get go, Unity was in special thrall to her next-oldest sister Diana, who had scandalized her family (and a lot of non-relatives too) when she left her perfectly respectable husband in 1933 to take up with Oswald Mosley, the charismatic founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists, with whom she had fallen madly in love. This relationship brought the impressionable young Unity (then 19) into the inner orbit of British Fascism during its most explosive period.
Adopting the blackshirt attire of the BUF, she threw herself into party rallies and other activities with a zeal that can only be called fanatical. To Nancy's novelistic eye, her fascisters' marching about and speechifying was alarming, true, but also more than a little absurd - - and obviously fodder for a book. She proceeded, therefore, to spin their distasteful carryings-on into a farcical, quasi-Wodehousian plot, involving a pair of cynical young city blokes who visit the hinterlands with the intent of meeting and marrying a couple of wealthy heiresses -- one such being an unabashed caricature of Unity. To say that this didn't go down well within the Mitford clan is a wild understatement. Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that the genuine suffering (emotional and otherwise) that befell the Mitfords in the ensuing years was so distressing to all concerned that Nancy would never allow "Wigs on the Green" to be reprinted during her lifetime. And that, you see, is why this is such a damn rare book. I actually don't expect to ever see another copy after I sell this one to you.
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