Wigs on the Green, by Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford never allowed her third novel, Wigs on the Green (1935), to be re-published during her lifetime. The main reason being she didn’t want to cause further offence to her family, as Wigs on the Green lampoons the politics of her sisters Unity and Diana. Both had been won over to the ‘cause’ of fascism and Nazism. Diana would become the lover and later wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (whom Nancy liked to call ‘Sir Ogre’). To try and appease Diana, Nancy cut three chapters which lampooned Sir Oswald Mosley. This tactic didn’t work, causing a rift between the sisters.

Meanwhile, Unity travelled to Germany and made friends with Hitler, but when Germany declared war on England, shot herself in the head. She survived, but in a much reduced state, and died in 1948. It’s Unity who is most directly lampooned in Wigs on the Green, in the guise of Eugenia Malmain, an ardent supporter of the Union Jackshirts (British Union of Fascists) and their leader General Jack (Sir Oswald Mosley.) The novel is fascinating and intriguing for this literary portrait alone. All the sisters adored Unity – even the Communist Jessica – despite her full embrace of Nazism. Nancy’s characterture gives readers a chance to examine what her appeal may have been.

Unity Mitford as Eugenia Malmain

While Eugenia Malmain is clearly bonkers in her devotion to the Union Jackshirts, there is something goddess like and romantic about her. Nancy good naturedly ridicules her political program, yet despite this Eugenia / Unity emerges as a formidable personality, a larger than life, Amazon like force of nature. Nancy Mitford clearly thinks that Eugenia / Unity was possessed of enormous energy and passion, simply needing some powerful political program to attach herself to. Tellingly, we are told in one scene that if Eugenia had been born in an earlier age, she would have become a suffragette.

Reading Wigs on the Green in 2011, its hard to see what all the fuss was about. The novel is not vicious in its send up of fascist politics. Nancy saw little difference between Communism and Fascism, seeing both as manifestations of the same will to absolute power. She lucidly describes the fascist political program and ideology, without examining too deeply what it all means, and where fascism and Nazism could possible lead Europe. She seems to treat it all as some hobby for mad eccentrics. Mitford obviously shouldn’t be judged for a lack of political clairvoyance; she’s simply telling it like she sees it, and Nancy Mitford was always determined to laugh away life’s painful realities.

Love Not Politics the Main Themes in Wigs on the Green

Hence the real theme of Wigs on the Green is not politics, but love and marriage. Nancy Mitford had anything but a successful love life. Before marrying Peter Rodd, she had a half-hearted relationship for four years with Hamish Erskine, who was homosexual. The marriage to Peter Rodd was pretty much a disaster from the get-go, with her husband a womaniser and heavy drinker. Much of what clearly must have been a heavy matrimonial disappointment is spun into light comedy in Wigs on the Green.

Most of the plot revolves around a skittish and restless set of pretty young things who endure loveless marriages and go off in search of romantic flings with others. In fact, it seems a riddle to most of the characters as to why marriage even exists, as no one takes their vows at all seriously. If anything, people get married simply because it’s the ‘done thing’, that and it provides financial stability.

The one character that must be closest to a self-portrait of Mitford herself, Poppy St Julien, is married to a cheating husband. In one scene she ponders whether she should divorce her husband, Anthony, in order to marry Jasper Aspect (the latter based on Mitford’s husband, Peter Rodd).

“Poppy wondered what she would do. Anthony St Julien was, after all, her husband, and she loved her little house in Chapel street. She did not have to close her eyes in order to visualise her drawing-room with its trellis wall-paper, red plush-curtains and satinwood furniture. It would be much harder to leave a dwelling to which she was singularly devoted, than a husband for whom devotion was now a thing of the past. In a position in which in many women would be weighing an old loyalty against a new passion, she found herself wondering whether it would be possible to smuggle her writing-table out of the house, should she decide to throw in her lot with Mr Aspect.”

This pretty much captures the novel’s theme, the delightful and permanent consolation of things, as opposed to the finicky and inconstant devotions of lovers. Nancy Mitford’s wit isn’t mean or malicious, she simply refused to take anything – including herself – seriously. Her fiction is an attempt to knock the pompous stuffing out of the world.

Wigs on the Green, by Nancy Mitford. Published by Vintage Books. ISBN: 978-0-307-74085-4