Diary of a Provincial Lady

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E. M. Delafield's largely autobiographical novel is written as the journal of an upper-middle class lady living in a Devonshire village. Full of the peculiarities of daily life, the Provincial Lady attempts to avoid disaster and prevent chaos from descending upon her household, including a husband reluctant to do anything but doze behind The Times, mischievous children and trying servants, all the while keeping up appearances to society-at-large, and most particularly to the patronising Lady Boxe, with whom the Provincial Lady is eternally competing.

As witty and delightful today as upon first publication in 1930, Diary of a Provincial Lady is a brilliantly observed comic novel and an acknowledged classic. Introduced by Christina Hardyment.

Born in 1890 to Count Henry de la Pasture and his novelist wife, E.M. Delafield was brought up according to strict Late Victorian precepts; upon failing to ensnare a husband at a young age, she entered a convent in Belgium the moment she turned 21. Having recovered from this experience, she later became a VAD (voluntary nursing for the war effort) and wrote her first novel. Delafield began publishing her writing in her mid-twenties; the year her fourth novel, Consequences, was published, she married Paul Dashwood, a civil engineer turned land agent.The pair spent three years in Malaya, followed by a country life in rural Devon; many of Delafield's novels and short stories are semi-autobiographical or stem from her experiences living abroad and in the rural countryside. Delafield died in 1943.