Love in a cold climate

I found Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate quite funny. As a book, its main purpose seems to be to ridicule aristocracy of 20th century England, however all fun is poked somewhat endearingly and we end up liking the characters for their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. My favourite of which is a character modeled on Mitford's father, who believes that if you write someone's name on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer, death will meet them shortly. Some passages find him frantically scribbling an enemy's name and jamming it in the draw, however we find that if (by coincidence) one of the named ends up meeting their fate, he does feel a little guilty for a day or two. The homesexual inference toward the end of the book surprised me with its blatancy, however I guess this is part "the rich can do what they like" - one of the points being presented in the book, and part "I don't know anything about the dates of progress of progressive ideas".

The story mentions Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway which prompted me to go out and read it. Mrs. Dalloway is amazingly written, some of the passages seem to perfectly capture that camera movement we see in films where a character is focused on then up and away we fly, through the window and to another. The style was sometimes hard to for me to keep track of, however the story is able to articulate depression and disillusionment authentically through its characters Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus who act as opposing poles of English society.