Although Nancy Mitford claimed in The Water Beetle (1962) to remember "almost nothing" about her childhood--"It is shrouded in a thick mist which seldom lifts except on the occasion of some public event"--she plundered material from her life for her eight comic novels. To tease her friends and family she often cast them as characters in her fictional plots; for instance, her irascible father appears as the wrathful General Murgatroyd in Highland Fling (1931) and the volatile Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love (1945). Not just transformed autobiographies, Mitford's novels define a style that combines physical humor, verbal sharpness, and the high-society glamor of the decades immediately before and after World War II. Like her friend Evelyn Waugh, Mitford satirizes the pretensions and shortcomings of the aristocracy; the heroines of her novels are both upper class and hopelessly gullible.

The daughter of David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman Mitford and...