Love in a Cold Climate is Nancy Mitford’s famous satire of the English aristocracy in the 1920s and 30s. Fanny is the narrator, a young woman who has spent her childhood with relatives, while her wealthy parents travelled and had love affairs. She watches as Lord and Lady Montdore of Hampton try to marry off their beautiful daughter Polly to someone suitable. Polly’s eventual choice of husband causes such shock and family turmoil, that the ageing Montdores disinherit her. For the purposes of the lavish Hampton legacy, they turn to a distant male cousin. Enter Cedric, dandy and aesthete, who quite turns Lady Montdore’s head.

It is interesting that Cedric modifies his dandified chit-chat to fit whatever audience he is seeking to entertain at any given moment. With Lady Montdore it’s all gossip and beauty tips. In the company of an Oxford don, it’s ‘burial custom in the High Yemen’. Love in a Cold Climate is a bit like that. You can read it as a fun soap opera, full of over the top characters. But if someone with intellectual presumptions were to accidentally pick it up, then the book can oblige there as well. After all, the title suggests a comparative study of love in different cultures. And in a strange sort of way that’s what Love in a Cold Climate is. Polly and her parents have recently returned from India where Lord Montdore was Viceroy. There is definitely a suggestion that love was freer under the topic sun. On the other hand when it comes to marriage, the cultural expectation in India was one of families tending to arrange unions to suit their interests. There is, of course, a similar tradition amongst the British upper classes. All the pressure of Polly’s situation comes from the fact that her parents want an alliance that will bring benefit to the Montdores, while Polly wants to follow her heart. She eventually succeeds in doing this but the consequences are less than happy. While arrangement can put two incompatible people together, a choice based on unpredictable human emotion hardly provides a reliable alternative.

This book certainly would not claim to be a comprehensive sociological study of love customs in the Home Counties – just as it can’t be considered a monograph on burial custom in the High Yemen. Nevertheless, when you’re dealing with something that involves deep emotions and superficial self-interest, hurt, joy, passion, easy companionship, hair primping and dressings-up, then maybe the unemotional academic approach is not the best way to understand the subject under consideration. Maybe you can learn something from a rom-com like Love in a Cold Climate.