Above painting: Louis Jean Francois - Mars and Venus an Allegory of Peace

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Monday, June 7, 2021

Mitford Family Pets

I've been familiar with the Mitford family since college, when I first read Nancy Mitford The Pursuit of Love and then just had to go on a deep dive into the infamous family.

For the past nearly two years, I've had the pleasure of digging even further into the family while researching my forthcoming novel THE MAYFAIR BOOKSHOP.

Side note here, I am SO EXCITED for this book to release, and I will be sharing all of the details here on History Undressed soon, including the cover! The novel is a dual timeline with a modern day book curator who has a connection to Nancy, and then the second point of view is Nancy herself. I've had some really great feedback from early readers!

So back to my topic today...

The Mitfords LOVED their pets. Nancy had a number of dogs, and loved French bulldogs so much, as did most of the family. There are so many fun stories about their pets when they were going up of which they had a veritable menagerie. In the family photo below you can see a couple of cute pets. Nancy is in the top row, sitting down on the left with her dog.

Not shown were the chickens, ponies, goats, etc... Several of Nancy's dogs make appearances in THE MAYFAIR BOOKSHOP. I'm a sucker for dogs, what can I say?

Fun pet fact...
Unity Mitford, on the left in the bottom row with two braids (also later in life to be a friend, and rumored mistress to Hitler), also had a pet rat named Ratular, that she would sneak into debutante balls along with her snake Enid to torment the other girls. Nice, right?

I tried to find a picture of her with her rat but alas, I have had no luck. I know I've seen it somewhere, so when I find it, I will update!

Do you have any pets? I have a Newfie, a lab/newf mix, a turtle and a hermit crab <3