Backcover blurb: The Provincial Lady has a nice house, a nice husband (usually asleep behind The Times) and nice children. In fact, maintaining Niceness is the Provincial Lady's goal in life - her raison d'etre. She never raises her voice, rarely ventures outside Devon (why would she?), only occasionally allows herself to become vexed by the ongoing servant problem, and would be truly appalled by the confessional mode of the late twentieth century.
About the author: Novelist, journalist and short story writer of French descent, E M Delafield (1890-1943) adopted this pseudonym to avoid confusion with her mother, Mrs Henry de la Pasture, the author of numerous, popular novels.
In 1917 her first novel, Zella Sees Herself, was published and she wrote three more novels before marrying Major Arthur Paul Dashwood OBE in 1919. When Lady Rhondda asked her to contribute a serial for the feminist journal Time and Tide, the result was A Diary of a Provincial Lady (first published in 1933), which made its author one of the best-loved writers of the 1930s.
The Provincial Lady Goes Further was published in 1932 and the next year her American lecture was serialised in Punch and formed The Provincial Lady in America (1934). The Provincial Lady in Wartime appeared in 1940.
E M Delafield was herself a provincial lady, whose writing combined wit and elegance with a deep interest in the lives of her class, an interest reflected in her role as magistrate and pillar of the WI.
At the age of fifty-three she died at home in Cullompton, Devon.
Here is a good piece about the author, E M Delafield, by The Independent three years ago.
My take: I love it! Delightfully humorous, frighteningly honest, charming, a breath of fresh air and very British indeed. Even though it was written in the 1930s, I do not feel a sense of a leaping progress from then till now of how women think and feel about a lot of things going in and around their lives. Fundamentally, we still think and feel the same way going on to 2012!
Written in diary form - not particularly my taste in reading a book - from 7 November of one year to 23 October of the next, it is so witty and clever it detracts me from thinking that it is. Although there is no plot to speak of, but the provincial lady's dry and caustic account of her domestic and social life in rural England is engrossing enough to make you think that one event is connected to the next and so on and so forth, and also, the other/same characters keep popping up now and then to gel the so-called plot together.
As E M Delafield wrote in 1935, "All that I have tried to do is to observe faithfully, and record accurately, the things that have come within my limited range. The fault that I have most tried to avoid is sentimentality."
Hand on heart, one thing that truly stands out is it is continuously funny. A wholly womanised book so don't know whether it will appeal to men much, if at all. Highly recommended. Do read it.
Rating: 4/5
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