In the autumn of 1969, Nancy Mitford picked up a newspaper and read the news that shattered whatever remained of her private world. Gaston Palewski, the French officer she had loved for more than two decades and considered the love of her life, had just married another woman. The bride was Henriette de Kerillis, an aristocrat who had been Palewski’s mistress for years—a woman with whom he had even fathered a child. He had not bothered to tell Nancy himself.

She learned of his wedding from the paper, like any stranger on the street, and she was left once more to pretend she did not care while her inner world collapsed around her. It was a long way from the glittering débutante ballroom of 1922, when Nancy Mitford had been presented to King George V and his court and the world seemed to be hers for the taking. Nancy Mitford was born on November 28th, 1904, the first child of David Mitford and Sydney Bowles, a couple so well-to-do that David’s lineage ran back to barons who had held influence since the Norman invasion of 1066. From the outside, her life looked perfect: beautiful, moneyed, intelligent, the darling of the bright young things who ran wild through London between the wars.

But her parents, themselves raised in sheltered luxury, barely knew what to do with her. And the attention she craved as a child only fragmented further as the Mitford family grew to an impressive seven children—brother Tom, and sisters including Diana, Unity, and Jessica, who would each in their own way bring the family name to infamy. When World War I broke out, the Mitfords’ fortunes shifted dramatically. Their uncle died on the front, their grandfather died at home, and Nancy’s father became a baron overnight.

In November 1922, Nancy turned eighteen and received an official coming-out ball to introduce her to society. Six months later came the formal presentation to the King. But the pomp and circumstance did not satisfy her. She had no interest in the fusty, conservative men and women her parents approved of.

The moment she could, she threw herself into the world of the bright young things: all-night costume parties, midnight scavenger hunts romping through the public transit systems, and endless drinking. As Nancy herself said of this period, “We hardly saw the light of day except at dawn. ”

She met scads of suitors during her reveling, but her eye fell consistently on the wrong sort: snobbish aesthetes, more frivolous than serious. In 1928, she met Hamish St.

Clair Erskine, a man who ticked every one of her boxes. As one friend described him, “Hamish was slight of build, well-dressed, always snobbish, and terribly conscious of his nobility. ” Nancy fell head over heels for the good-looking dandy. Her father fumed.

And the deeper problems were considerable. Hamish was four years younger than Nancy, immature for his age by any measure, and by most accounts simply not a stand-up man. One contemporary called him the most shimmering and narcissistic of men. Nancy’s own friends urged her to dump him, dress better, and catch a better man.

But there was a far worse incompatibility: Hamish was very certainly gay. Nancy may never have realized where his proclivities lay, and she almost certainly never accepted the truth. What is more, he was hiding an even bigger secret. Incredibly, Nancy was not the first Mitford Hamish had dallied with.

While at Eton together, Hamish had carried on a romantic relationship with Nancy’s own brother, Tom—a fact Nancy most likely never discovered. None of this stopped Hamish from becoming formally engaged to Nancy. And it was not going to end well. In this state of clinging to a man who could not love her the way she loved him, Nancy brought the first of many scandals to her family.

She had dabbled in writing for years, and in 1931 she published her first novel, Highland Fling, a barely veiled portrait of her friends and their raucous lifestyles, with Hamish appearing as the character Bobby Bobbin. Her polite parents were shocked that she would air the aristocracy’s dirty laundry, especially under her own name. But if the Mitfords thought that was as bad as it would get, they were gravely mistaken. In 1932, Nancy’s sister Diana outdid her in infamy by a mile.

Diana had married Bryan Walter Guinness in 1929 and had two young sons with him; they were one of high society’s power couples. Then Diana abandoned her family to become the mistress of Sir Oswald Mosley, the married leader of the British Union of Fascists. Here Nancy made some questionable decisions. Most of the Mitfords censured Diana’s immorality in running off with a married man, though they were less bothered by her choice of lover or his repellent politics.

Nancy took a different tack. Casting herself as a moderate peacekeeper—a role she would play for the rest of her life—she acted as a go-between for Diana, still visiting her and feeding her family gossip. For a short time, Nancy even became interested in Mosley’s politics herself, though she quickly turned against them. She soon had her own fresh disgrace to deal with.

In the middle of the family’s turmoil, Hamish twisted the knife. In a completely heartless move, he coolly informed Nancy they were done for good because he was going to marry a banker’s daughter. Reeling from the rejection, Nancy made a quick decision that turned into a fatal mistake. She announced to her family that she was engaged to a man named Peter Rodd, son of a politician.

Some called Rodd a young man of boundless promise; others found him shifty and lazy. Her friends were not happy with her choice. They were about to become a great deal unhappier. Nancy went through with the engagement and married Peter Rodd in December 1933.

The bliss of finally being a married woman quickly gave way to the sneaking suspicion that her husband was, in fact, a dud. Slowly they grew apart, and the messy Mitford family dynamics rose again with a vengeance. While Diana had brought shame by marrying an intolerant fool, sister Unity took things another level. As the 1930s dawned, Unity became obsessed with the Third Reich and everything it represented.

Nancy’s conservative parents did little to stop either of their daughters. Nancy, as usual, took matters into her own hands. In 1934, she published another novel, Wigs on the Green, which lambasted Mosley and his ideology and ignited another raging family feud. Diana resented her for years; Unity was so upset she never reconciled with her again.

The drama did not end there. In 1937, the second youngest Mitford daughter, Jessica, caused yet another scandal—this time in the opposite political direction. At nineteen, she eloped with her own cousin, Esmond Romilly, a card-carrying communist. The political discussions at the Mitford dinner table must have been anything but dull.

Nancy had little energy to devote to the family drama, because her personal life was falling apart again. By 1938, her marriage to Peter Rodd had gone from quietly depressing to fully disturbing. Rodd was carrying on an open-secret affair with the wife of a friend for nearly a year, all the while resenting every waking minute Nancy was not beside him, throwing him adoring glances. Nancy stayed anyway.

Then the inevitable happened. In the warm weather of 1938, Nancy made a chilling discovery: she was pregnant with Peter Rodd’s child, and it looked as though they would be miserably bound together for life. That September, after all her worrying over the child, she suffered a miscarriage. It was only the beginning of her increasingly chaotic life.

In September 1939, the quiet country life the Mitfords once knew fell apart for good. With the onset of World War II, the family’s various factions self-destructed. Nancy and her husband supported the Allies, but it was not so easy for her siblings. Diana, whom Nancy called a ruthless and shrewd egotist, had just gone from mistress to wife of Oswald Mosley.

Unity was now a close personal friend of the Führer himself. The moment Great Britain declared war on Germany, a near-fatal crisis hit the family. Unity, beside herself that her home country was attacking her spiritual homeland, shot herself in the head while living in Munich. Incredibly, she survived, though with the mental capacity of a ten-year-old child.

Her family cared for her for the rest of her life. Nancy spent the war helping Jewish families in the London Blitz and even reporting on her right-wing sisters to the government. In 1940, she suffered another miscarriage, followed by a cold abandonment: even as she was still convalescing, her husband Peter Rodd took leave to serve overseas. He would spend the rest of the war away from home.

Recovering, Nancy worked a humble job at a bookshop, hoping to reset her life and habits. Then another whirlwind knocked her off her feet. In 1942, she met Gaston Palewski, a French colonel in Charles de Gaulle’s inner circle. She was instantly smitten in a way she had not been since Hamish St.

Clair Erskine all those years before. It felt like a new beginning. It was really the same old nightmare. Palewski was dashing, brave, and utterly fascinating to Nancy.

But he carried serious red flags. His rampant, constant womanizing was so bad it had permanently damaged his chances at a successful political career—a telling measure, given that this was a Frenchman in the 1940s. But that was the least of Nancy’s worries. The real problem was that, as usual, she was far more in love with him than he was with her.

She considered him the love of her life. He, well, would show her his true nature in time. Because of her reputation in aristocratic circles, Nancy and Palewski kept their affair strictly secret for more than half a year while both lived in London. When Palewski left to serve in Algeria in May, they continued the tryst through correspondence that Nancy mostly kept alive and Palewski merely tolerated.

Nancy was virtually alone again and needed distraction. What she got was far more than she bargained for. The Mitford siblings were not the only ones tearing each other apart. Nancy’s parents were coming apart at the seams.

Her father, David, who had dallied with right-wing ideas, became staunchly anti-German and patriotic after the start of the conflict. Her mother, Sydney, decided to stand behind Diana, Unity, and their terrible obsessions. By 1943, the strain was too much, and the couple separated. The Mitfords, in one sense, were no more.

Then came another blow. In 1945, Nancy received horrific news. Her brother Tom, like Diana and Unity, was staunchly pro-German. Because of this, he had refused to fight in the Rhineland, though he agreed to fight for Britain against Imperial Japan.

It did not go well. Tom died in action while serving in Burma, just weeks before the end of World War II. The Mitfords had lost their son and heir, and Nancy was about to lose even more. With the war wrapping up, Nancy published one of her most famous novels, The Pursuit of Love, partially inspired by her illicit relationship with Gaston Palewski.

In a traumatized world, this slice of warm British living energized readers; the novel was a critical and financial success. But it also made the next phase of her life incredibly awkward. In 1945, her long-absent husband Peter Rodd returned from the war for good, and he met a very different woman than the one he had left. Nancy and Peter reached an uncomfortable truth: their marriage was over in all but name, and it was time to live separate lives.

Without further ado, Nancy left England for good and moved to Paris. Her reasons were hardly liberating. She was there, at least in large part, for her lover Gaston, and she settled on the Left Bank conveniently close to his residence. To be fair, these next years were likely among the happiest of her life.

But on paper, they were also the most pitiful. While in Paris, Nancy produced Love in a Cold Climate as a sequel to The Pursuit of Love. It was another professional achievement, praised by friends and critics alike. But her personal life left much to be desired.

Her entire downtime revolved around Palewski’s busy schedule, and he repaid her with betrayal. He loved Nancy in his own way, but he did not think that meant he had to stop seeing other women. By 1957, life threw another wrench into her plans. Palewski’s superiors stationed him in Italy.

Their meetings dwindled until they grew almost nonexistent, each busy with work, and he deigned to visit her only once a year. The toll on Nancy was quiet but mighty. She tried to adopt a laissez-faire attitude, pretending she did not really care if she saw him or not. Her friends saw straight through it.

Her teasing of them turned sharp and savage, even as she refused to confess her woes. It would not be entirely fair to portray Nancy as a weak lover always waiting for Palewski’s call. In her two main novels about their relationship, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, she used him as a character and blatantly portrayed him as a womanizer incapable of faithfulness. But Palewski, for his part, had one more surprise in store.

Around the time Nancy was pining for him from a distance, Palewski took up with Henriette de Kerillis, another blue-blood aristocrat. It was far more than a fling. Henriette was married, but she and Palewski engaged in a years-long affair that produced a love child. Then came the final parting insult, in 1969, when Nancy read the newspaper and learned they had married.

Palewski still did not entirely cut ties. He kept stringing Nancy along for the next half decade. By the 1970s, Mitford was just sixty-eight but suffering from failing physical and mental health. Doctors eventually diagnosed her with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a fatal condition she took with the classic Mitford stiff and wry upper lip.

As she wrote to one friend, “It’s very curious, dying, and would have many an amusing and charming side were it not for the pain. ”

On June 30th, 1973, she passed away in her home in France. Despite the emotional turbulence she had endured throughout her life, her legacy was cemented through literary success. And with all the heartache her chaotic love life had brought her, her passing contained one final storybook twist.

Ironically enough, with the dedication he should have given her in life, Gaston Palewski was by her side at the very end.