The Pursuit of Love: Britain's most scandalous family

As a BBC TV adaptation of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love becomes available to stream internationally, John Self explores its real-life inspiration – the author's own family.

"I must it, 'The Mitfords' would madden me if I didn't chance to be one," wrote Diana Mitford to her sister Deborah in 1985. "How ghastly [they] all sound, though of course in real life haha they are ideal." And so say all of us! The success of the new BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love (which this week is now being made available to watch internationally on Amazon Prime), and the renewed interest it has sparked in the bonkers, scandalous family that created and inspired it, makes us ask: what is it about the Mitford sisters that keeps us reading – and watching?

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The Pursuit of Love, which was published in 1945, sold 200,000 copies in its first year and has rarely been out of print since, shows that there is a ready audience for its delightful blend of wit and absurdity. Its story of the love lives of of the eccentric Radlett family is funny, satirical and full of deliciously strange people, like the hypochondriac suitor Davey who "twisted his tonsil, singing" and was "on a new diet: one meal white, one meal red."

And the book leads to the family, because The Pursuit of Love comes from Nancy Mitford's early life: it's " when we were little". That is one reason why she found it so easy to write, and why she found subsequent novels so difficult. (The follow up, Love in a Cold Climate, is less a sequel than an equal, being set in the same time frame as The Pursuit of Love but following a different branch of the family tree.) Making up stories is difficult when your own family seems like the most fantastic work of fiction. Nancy's friend Evelyn Waugh, who came up with the title, said she had used up all her plots in one book – which of course is why it has such pace and zest.

The Radletts in the book, cousins of narrator Fanny Logan, are really the aristocratic Mitfords, who were privileged though not fantastically rich, perhaps in part because of extravagances like sending their laundry to Harrods in London when they were holidaying on a Scottish island.

Uncle Matthew in the book is directly based on Nancy's father, Lord Redesdale, though as far as we know he never used an entrenching tool to "whack to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out." He did however, remarkably – to cite one of the crazier exploits in The Pursuit of Love – hunt his children with a bloodhound, though the reality was more playful and less terrifying than the book has it. His wife Sydney believed, as Mitford biographer Mary S Lovell put it, "that the name of a decent woman should appear in the newspapers only twice: first on her marriage, and second in her obituary." Her daughters did not live up to this standard.

Lord Redesdale once said, "I am normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other." Well. Like Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love, he read only one book in his life – not White Fang ("so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another," as Uncle M put it), but Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which he hated because of the tragic ending. When it was explained to him that it was only a story, Lord Redesdale was even angrier: "What? Do you mean the damn sewer invented it">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });