E M Delafield

I was thinking - it only seems fair that I should share with you some of the fruits of my research, which means that you get the fun bits without having to write huge swathes and have your supervisor ask you to re-write them. Basically, you're getting the fun bit of my doctoral work, without even having to pay university fees.

Don't worry, I shan't quote reams of literary criticism or anything like that, but part of my recent work has been looking through old periodicals for reviews of the Provincial Lady books. And I thought you might quite enjoy the review Time and Tide gave to my favourite of the series, The Provincial Lady Goes Further. A bit nepotistic, since PLGF was serialised in Time and Tide, but never mind...

Alongside this review is a picture I came across by accident in another issue of Time and Tide - not sure how flattered EMD would have been by this likeness, but thought I'd share it with you nonetheless.

Let me know if this sort of thing interests you, and I'll pop some more contemporary reviews in as and when I find them.

Time and Tide, November 12^th 1932

Review by Francis Iles

‘Miss Delafield’s last book about her Provincial Lady was the Book Society’s first choice for December, 1930; the present one, though obviously a better book, is not even on their recommended list. As so often before in connection with the Book Society, one wonders and one wonders. Oh, ruddier than the Ike… [Simon's note: this is a reference to Red Ike, one of the Book Society choices]

Miss Delafield has always seemed to me a writer who has not received quite her due. I have seen it written, and by a responsible critic, that when one has read one of her books one has read them all. The only explanation of such a remark is that the responsible critic himself has not read them all; for, with the exception of the impishly experimental Mr. C. S. Forrester, I know of no other author who has ever produced four consecutive books more different in every respect than A Reversion to Type, Messalina of the Suburbs, Mrs. Harter, and The Chip and the Block.

For the sly humour that arises out of a maliciously penetrating observation of character, with never a word of superfluous explanation or a jog of the reader’s elbow, and still more for economical, mordant delineation of feminine character through dialogue (her men are not always so successful) Miss Delafield has no equal. Her technique is as brilliant as it is self-effacing. She can pack more self-revelation into a couple of ordinary spoken sentences, than any other novelist. I always remember a certain Vicar’s Wife in one of her books, who appears only once and who speaks only five words, but from those five words we at once know everything there is to be known about her; we know what her husband thought about her and what her cook, we know exactly how she would have decorated the parish hall for a Penny Reading, and why she could never cook an omelette. She is watching a set of very inferior country tennis, and one of the players has just muffed a shot; the Vicar’s Wife turns to her neighbour and says brightly: “Just like Wimbledon , isn’t it?” Miss Delafield, in fact, lacks only a rather stronger sense of construction and plot to be one of the most important novelists writing today; for her more serious work, though less intensely individual, will stand comparison with any other writer’s, while in her own particular line of satirical humour she is unsurpassed.

The Provincial Lady Goes Further is, of course, Miss Delafield at her very lightest, and it is one of the wittiest books that has appeared for years. I read it at a sitting; and, though perhaps it would have been better taken in 100-page doses, the book stood it, which its predecessor did not. It is a better book than The Diary of a Provincial Lady because the interest is more diversified. The scene shifts more rapidly, between the country and London and even to a Literary Congress in Belgium , with the result that we meet a better-contrasted set of people. Moreover the Provincial Lady herself is shown as less of a figure of fun than in the earlier book, so that we really can believe that she has written the important novel which has opened the doors of Bloomsbury to her, with such admirable results for the reader. The whole thing is a little masterpiece of sly fun, which one will want to buy and keep because it will bear endless re-reading.'