In Highland Fling —Nancy Mitford’s first novel, published in 1931—a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle, where bright young things play pranks on their stodgy elders until the frothy plot climaxes in ghost sightings and a dramatic fire. Inspired in part by Mitford’s youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus, and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humor. Lighthearted and sparkling with witty banter, Highland Fling was Mitford’s first foray into the delightful fictional world for which the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate later became so celebrated. With an Introduction by Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey.   “Highland Fling is a taster of coming delights. . . . It is the first time Mitford attempted to quantify and codify and explain the world of her beginnings, always seen with her wonderful, comic vision. . . . There is cruelty beneath the comedy, a kind of sharpness that bears testimony to the force of her judgment even when it is wrapped in the cotton wool of humour. But most of all, there is truth.” —from the Introduction by Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey 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. More information can be found at www.nancymitford.com. Excerpted from the Introduction In a sense, Highland Fling is a taster of coming delights. It was Nancy Mitford’s first novel, published in 1931 when she was still in her twenties, and among its pages the reader may find seeds of the characters that would so memorably people her later books, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate , for both of which she is justly celebrated. General Murgatroyd is certainly the ancestor of Uncle Matthew, both descending, as they do, from Mitford’s own father, Lord Redesdale, who must surely rank as her principal source material throughout her career. I always enjoy his response when he was accused of discrimination. ‘I don’t discriminate,’ he spluttered indignantly. ‘I hate everybody.’ But alongside the splenetic General, there are clear traces of Linda Radlett in Jane Dacre, Lady Prague lays the groundwork for Lady Montdore, Albert Memorial Gates is a precursor of Cedric Hampton, and so on. But if it is fun to find the clues of what would come after, the book has its own merit in that this is the first time Mitford attempted to quantify and codify and explain the world of her beginnings, always seen with her wonderful, comic vision. Admittedly, this world was not a hard place. Young couples live on nothing at all, highland castles are lent and borrowed, no one seems to have much in mind beyond some decent shooting and dinner at the club. Only Albert is engaged in anything remotely resembling a profession and that as a surrealist painter. Mitford’s men did not push pens or languish behind desks; her women spent their time gossiping and changing their clothes. Nor did they question the rules of a society that allowed them to idle away their days, or ask why they should be waited on hand and foot even when they hadn’t a penny to their name. But that is what makes this account of them a restful and hilarious read. It was a thoughtless age, perhaps, and even a selfish one, but without our moral smuggery which prompts every soap opera celebrity to veil their own self-obsession with much vaunted, anguished care for the environment or the survival of the whale. There is an honesty in that. As a young woman, Nancy Mitford was madly, if quite unsuccessfully, in love with a Scottish aristocrat, Hamish St Clair-Erskine, and it is hard not to feel that Highland Fling may, in some ways, be a form of revenge after those wasted, tearful years in fruitless pursuit. How much time must she have spent in just such houses as Dalloch Castle, waiting for Hamish to love her, and how frustrating it must have been. Lord Craigdalloch himself, to say nothing of horsy Lady Brenda Chadlington or the intolerably dull Admiral Wenceslaus, all have the quality of being drawn from life, while the snobbish and philistine Lady Prague comes i