A review by nickartrip102
The Blessing by Nancy Mitford

3.0

"She told me, at luncheon, that she has hardly been out in society since the war, but she spent all those years looking after goats. Of course the English are very eccentric...you have never crossed the Channel, but you can take it from me that they are all half mad, a country of enormous, fair, mad, atheists. Why did she look after goats? We shall never know. But looking after goats can hardly be considered as a good preparation for life with Charles-Edouard."

I selected The Blessing by Nancy Mitford via random draw from my TBR list, which was pretty great timing. Nancy Mitford is a fabulous way to begin the new year. Grace Allingham, a naïve English heiress, impulsively marries the older French nobleman, Charles-Edouard de Valhubert. The two barely know one another and spend the first seven years of their marriage apart because of the war. Once the war is over, Grace and Charles-Edouard make their way to France with their young son, Sigismund. Charles-Edouard cannot resist falling back into his old, woman-chasing ways, while Grace experiences a bit of a culture shock.

I really enjoyed the plot of The Blessing. Per the introduction, this is Nancy Mitford’s “most personal” work and the relationship between Grace and Charles-Edouard mirrors that of her relationship with Gaston Palewski. I definitely got swept away in that, and although the blurb made it seem as if this book would be more about Sigismund and his antics, I really thought this was was a book about Grace and her acceptance of the circumstances governing her marriage. I also like the way that Mitford pokes fun at the hypocrisy of English traditionalism (at least in terms of marriage and adultery.) I really enjoyed the scenes with Sigi, they definitely contributed to the overall humor of the novel and I found it rather impossible not to be charmed by his troublemaking (the scenes with the burglar were hilarious!)

I really enjoyed The Blessing. I would rank it lower than The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, but higher than Wigs on the Green or Don’t Tell Alfred. It definitely has that signature charm and is brimming with humor. Also is this Mitford’s gayest book? Nancy Mitford was certainly a bit of a “fag hag” (her father railed against her effeminate friends, she was engaged to a homosexual, and was a dear friend of Evelyn Waugh. There are so many wonderful little quotes about gay men and purported lesbians in this book:

"But, poor old things, they're not sick...they just happen to like boys better than girls. You can't blame them for that, it's awfully inconvenient, and they'd give anything to be different. But I don't see that it's any reason to call them Bolshevists. I probably know more about them than you do, having been at Eton and Oxford, and if there's one thing they're not it's Bolshevists."