English writer and socialite Nancy Mitford was BOTD in 1904. Born in London, she was the first child of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Reesdale, and the eldest of six sisters. She had an eccentric upbringing, educated largely by governesses, and spent her teens in the family’s country estate in Oxfordshire. Presented at court in 1922, she became a popular socialite. Through her bisexual brother Tom, she befriended an astonishing number of gay and bisexual aristocrats who became known as the Bright Young Things, including Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Robert Byron, Tom Driberg, L. P. Hartley, Gavin Henderson, Brian Howard, James Lees-Milne, Nancy and Tom Mitford, Edith and Osbert Sitwell and Stephen Tennant. She also developed a close friendship with Evelyn Waugh, who became her literary mentor, maintaining a witty, gossipy correspondence over several decades. Encouraged by Waugh, she became a magazine columnist and novelist, skittishly observing the antics of her socialite friends. Her love life was less successful, due to her habit of falling in love with her gay friends. After waiting unsuccessfully for Byron to propose marriage, she complained, “This wretched paederasty falsifies all feelings and yet one is supposed to revere it.” She then spent five years engaged to the very gay Hamish St-Clair Erskine, until he broke things off, falsely claiming to be in love with another woman. Three weeks later, Nancy became engaged to the solidly heterosexual Peter Rodd, marrying in 1933. In 1939, she and Rodd went to Spain to work with refugees from the Civil War, separating due to Rodd’s frequent infidelities. She returned to London for the remainder of World War Two, supporting herself by working in Heywood Hill bookshop in Mayfair. Her war years were turbulent, suffering two miscarriages and a hysterectomy, feuding with her Nazi-sympathiser sisters Diana and Unity, and falling in love with the charismatic but elusive French diplomat Gaston Palewski. In the 1940s, she published the comic novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, inspired by her eccentric family, Bright Young Thing party years, Spanish war experiences and her romance with Palewski. They became immediate bestsellers, catapulting her to literary celebrity and (for the first time) financial security. She moved to Paris in 1946 to be closer to Palewski, tolerating his many infidelities while enjoying a hectic social life, and publishing popular biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire and King Louis XIV. Her satirical 1955 article on language and social class, U and Non-U, became unexpectedly successful, seized on by social climbers eager to sound upper-crust. Heartbroken after Pawelski’s marriage to a rich divorcée, she spent her final years battling cancer, dying in 1973, aged 68. One of England’s most enduringly popular writers, she earns Honorary SuperGay status for her love of gay men and pithy one-liners. She was played by Bessie Carter in the 2025 TV series Outrageous, chronicling the lives of the Mitford sisters.