Hailing from a famously talented and eccentric family, Nancy Mitford is perhaps the best known of her siblings, although the real woman is hidden behind her autobiographical early novels. Sifting through Mitford's journalism and the vast body of letters to her sisters, lovers, and such friends as Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly, Laura Thompson has put together an affectionate portrait of a contradictory figure who expressed anti-feminist views while living a life of financial and emotional independence; quintessentially English, but only truly at home in France.