India Knight: 'I tend not to write anything personal anymore'

India Knight discusses her retelling of Nancy Mitford’s classic The Pursuit Of Love, why she's moved away from personal writing and sticking with a partner during 'rocky periods' ahead of her appearance at the West Cork Literary Festival

India Knight: appearing at West Cork Literary Festival

Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit Of Love is a classic novel of the inter-war era. 

It tells the story of the wildly romantic Linda Radlett who dreams of love, and an escape from her aristocratic country home. 

The book has recently been given a modern makeover by journalist and author India Knight, whose novel, Darling, is a contemporary retelling of the classic.

Knight is a regular visitor to Bantry for the West Cork Literary Festival and says, “when I first came to Bantry, my first thought was, oh my god, I want to live here! I really love Field’s Supervalu in Skibbereen. We take the ferry and when we arrive we go to Field’s Supervalu in Skibbereen and I exhale.”

In Knight’s retelling of The Pursuit Of Love, Linda is the daughter of a former rockstar father and a boho mother. 

She is still dreaming of love and romance but Knight wanted to redress the balance when it came to some of the more outdated elements of the original novel.

“It’s interesting all of those attitudes you absorb from writers like Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, but they were so racist. I wanted to get rid of all of that. So in my book the mother is half-Indian and I wanted to get rid of the sexism and the misogyny that made original Linda need to be rescued by a sophisticated Frenchman.”

Those problematic aspects of the book aside, was she nervous at all about modernising such a revered book?

“I wouldn’t have dared,” she says. “The Mitford estate approached me to do a contemporary retelling. I was incredibly flattered and pleased and strutted around feeling delighted with myself for about three months and then, when I had to sit down and start writing it, I was completely paralysed, I was so intimidated. I didn’t know how to do it. I knew the novel incredibly well, and the people in the book, but I didn’t know how to do it because it is, in its way, a perfect novel. I couldn’t improve on it and I didn’t know how to do it in a way which wasn’t ventriloquy or pastiche.

“And then covid happened and I was trying to write this glass of champagne in really dark times. Eventually, happily, about three years in, I knew how to do it. And the way to do it was to let Nancy Mitford go, to not have the book on the desk, to not read up on the
milieu because for a long time — I don’t mean this in a twatty way of Nancy’s spirit being by my side — but I could hear her very chilly, sarcastic voice sneering at my attempts and the way to make that stop was to put the book in a drawer and be confident that I knew the bones of the book well enough to put my own flesh on them.”

Knight’s own life can read a little like a Mitford novel. Born in Brussels to a young Pakistani mother and Belgian father, she moved to London at the age of nine when her mother married Andrew Knight, then editor of The Economist. 

Knight first encountered The Pursuit Of Love when she was sent to boarding school.

“I found England and Englishness quite difficult to get a handle on. I was at a French school in London and my whole school day was in French and we had really delicious school dinners and people expressing their emotions and then I went to this English boarding school and the culture shock was just extraordinary. You were allowed seven things on your chest of drawers — a hairbrush, a photograph and most people at my first dormitory, their seven objects would be, an aerial photo of the family home, a horse or a pony, no mummy and daddy, no siblings, no people having a laugh, really weird. And so The Pursuit of Love, which I loved the romance of, was a really good introduction to that very particular kind of Englishness where everything is a joke and you take nothing seriously because you can’t freely express excitement or love and so you turn everything into a tease. I didn’t come from a teasing, sarcastic or ironic culture so I found it fascinating and useful.”

After studying modern languages at college, Knight got her start in journalism through the graduate trainee programme at The Times of London.

“I came into writing because I couldn’t do anything else. I always had a vague notion at the back of my head that I would become a translator from the French to the English and then I very quickly realised that nobody was going to ask me to translate Balzac, you ended up doing simultaneous translation at a conference about chemicals, so that was the end of that. The only other thing that I was reasonably competent in was typing and writing.”

A column in The Observer led to her first novel, My Life On A Plate, which was perceived as a roman-à-clef about her marriage to Jeremy Langmead with whom she has two sons.

“I tend not to write anything personal anymore,” she says of that experience. “At the time I was 28 or 29 and was really excited to be asked to write a book, I wish I could put myself back in that place. I purely enjoyed the pleasure of writing the book. I didn’t think, what are people going to think? Or are people going to think that’s an exact portrait of me or my husband or children? I just didn’t worry about it. I did it quite guilelessly. Of course, that sense of guilelessness erodes as you get older and, whatever work you produce, you start stressing out over. I try to exist in a state of semi-isolation. I still never read reviews. I lay my egg, the egg hatches and the chicken runs off and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

At the heart of The Pursuit of Love is a romantic belief that love conquers all. Knight’s own romantic history could be described as tumultuous. She and Langmead divorced and he remarried Simon Rayner, while Knight went on to have a daughter with the author Andrew O’Hagan. In 2020, her partner, the former Labour MP Eric Joyce, admitted having an indecent movie of a child on a device. I wonder might she have preferred a quiet 40-year marriage.

“I really admire 40-year marriages. I have this conversation with my partner quite often actually about whether people give up too easily when they’re young and I think the answer to that is probably, yeah, they do. They have more options, we don’t have to put up with anything, we’re more narcissistic, we’re more selfish, we feel like the L’Oreal hair ad — we’re worth it, worth being cherished and pedestaled and princessed — but I think those early years when you have young children and everything is exhausting and you’re tired and you don’t have enough money and one of you is doing better than the other and everything is really stressful and maybe somebody flirts with somebody at work...

“Retrospectively, I don’t know that a whole relationship and a whole life together is worth junking because of rocky periods. I am a romantic at heart.”

• India Knight will be at the West Cork Literary Festival on July 11, 8.30pm, at the Maritime Hotel.