Two sparkling comedies from early in the career of the beloved author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, here published in one volume with a new introduction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. •  “Exuberant...enjoyable skulduggery and shenanigans.” —The New York Times In Christmas Pudding, an array of colorful characters converge on the hunt-obsessed Lady Bobbin’s country house, including her rebellious daughter Philadelphia, the girl’s pompous suitor, a couple of children obsessed with newspaper death notices, and an aspiring writer whose serious first novel has been acclaimed as the funniest book of the year, to his utter dismay. In Pigeon Pie, set at the outbreak of World War II, Lady Sophia Garfield dreams of becoming a beautiful spy but manages not to notice a nest of German agents right under her nose, until the murder of her maid and kidnapping of her beloved bulldog force them on her attention, with heroic results. Delivered with a touch lighter than that of Mitford’s later masterpieces but no less entertaining, these comedies combine glamour, wit, and fiendishly absurd plots into irresistible literary confections. “Exuberant...enjoyable skulduggery and shenanigans.” — The New York Times   “Beautifully wrought works of art. . . . [Mitford] excels at mixing romance with laughter, and adding goodly portions of astute observation, neat character drawing, and daring opinions.”  —from the introduction by Jane Smiley NANCY MITFORD, daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale and the eldest of the six legendary Mitford sisters, was born in 1904 and educated at home on the family estate in Oxfordshire. She made her debut in London and soon became one of the bright young things of the 1920s, a close friend of Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and their circle. A beauty and a wit, she began writing for magazines and writing novels while she was still in her twenties. In all, she wrote eight novels as well as biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XIV, and Frederick the Great. She died in 1973. Excerpted from the Forward In her 1954 biography of Madame de Pompadour, the famous mistress of French King Louis XV, Nancy Mitford writes, “Then there were the hours of chat, and here Madame de Pompadour had an enormous asset in his eyes; she was very funny. Hitherto the King’s mistresses had told few jokes and the Queen even fewer; he had never known that particularly delightful relationship of sex mixed up with laughter.” In Madame de Pompadour, surely Nancy Mitford’s devoted readers recognize the author herself. She might be restrained by custom (and the censor) from writing much about sex, but she excels at mixing romance with laughter, and at adding goodly portions of astute observation, neat character drawing, and daring opinions. Christmas Pudding (published in 1932, when Mitford was twenty-eight) and Pigeon Pie, written in the last months of 1939 and published in 1940, are not as well known as works Mitford wrote after the war, such as Love in a Cold Climate, but they foreshadow Mitford’s mastery of the comic form and her light but expert style. They also explore interesting issues of class and fashion, and they excavate many of the traditions of English comic form. But, most important, they are fun to read, which was likely Mitford’s dearest intention. Nancy Mitford came by her literary talent legitimately. Her paternal grandfather, the first Lord Redesdale, wrote two volumes about his adventures in the British Foreign Service, stationed in, among other places, St. Petersburg, Beijing, and Japan. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles, founded the original British version of Vanity Fair magazine (1868–1914) and wrote many of its articles. Mitford herself was an avid reader as a child who, according to her friend and biographer Harold Acton, made obsessive use of her father’s richly endowed library. (Her father, the second Lord Redesdale, bragged that he had only read one book in his life, Jack London’s White Fang, which he maintained was “so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.”) Mitford was educated mostly at home, but she was sent to a finishing school when she was sixteen. One of the best opportunities school offered was a spring trip with a group of other girls to Paris, Rome, and Venice. Mitford made excellent use of her chance—she wrote copious and amusing letters to her mother and other friends. Subsequently, after a rather dull year of “coming out” (into London society), she moved into her family’s house in London and emerged as a significant member of the 1920s “Bright Young Things” generation, a fashionable, notorious group of friends that also included writers Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, and Sacheverell Sitwell. In spite of her prosperous upper-class background, Mitford started out like most young authors—she had no source of income and turned to writing articles for a few pounds each for Vo