E. M. Delafield Explained

E. M. Delafield
Birth Name:Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture
Birth Date:9 June 1890
Birth Place:Steyning, Sussex, England
Resting Place:Kentisbeare, Devon, England
Occupation:Novelist
Genres:-->
Subjects:-->
Notableworks:Diary of a Provincial Lady

Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (9 June 1890  - 2 December 1943), commonly known as E. M. Delafield, was a prolific English author. She wrote novels, short stories, and plays, among other genres, but Delafield is best known for her largely autobiographical Diary of a Provincial Lady, which took the form of a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman living mostly in a Devon village of the 1930s. In sequels, the Provincial Lady buys a flat in London, travels to America and attempts to find war-work during the Phoney War. Delafield's other works include an account of a visit to the Soviet Union, but this is not part of the Provincial Lady series, despite having been reprinted with the title The Provincial Lady in Russia.[1] Delafield is considered by many to have been a master of the comedy of manners.[2]

Life

Delafield was born in Steyning, Sussex. She was the elder daughter of Count Henry Philip Ducarel de la Pasture, of Llandogo Priory, Monmouthshire, and Elizabeth Lydia Rosabelle Bonham, daughter of Edward William Bonham, who as Mrs Henry de la Pasture was also a well-known novelist.[3] The pen name Delafield she adopted later was a thin disguise on de la Pasture that her sister Yoé suggested.[4] The de la Pasture family was bilingual, and young Elizabeth was educated until she was 10 by a series of French governesses (a condensed version of whom appears as Mademoiselle in the Provincial Lady series).[5] When deemed too old for governesses, E.M.D. attended several convent schools until 1907 when she was seventeen.[6] Count Henry died suddenly of a heart attack the next year when Edmeé was entering the marriage market.[7] Edmeé was lively and charming, but shy, so both she and her Yoé “failed” as debutantes.[8] Their mother, on the other hand, quickly succeeded in finding another husband—Sir Hugh Clifford GCMG, who governed the colonies of the Gold Coast (1912–19), Nigeria (1919–25), Ceylon (1925–27) and the Malay States.[9] Sir Clifford is said to have been the inspiration for Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen.[10]

In 1911, at age 21, with her newly married mother abroad, and having few options available, Delafield chose to pursue a religious life. She was accepted as a postulant by a French religious order established in Belgium.[11] Her account of the experience, The Brides of Heaven, was written in 1931 and eventually published in her biography. "The motives which led me, as soon as I was 21, to enter a French Religious Order are worthy of little discussion, and less respect" she begins. These motives appear to have included receiving only one marriage offer as a debutante, and that only from “a boy who didn’t mean anything” (according to her mother’s standards).[12] She recounts being told by the Superior that if a doctor advised a surgical operation "your Superiors will decide whether your life is of sufficient value to the community to justify the expense. If it is not, you will either get better without the operation or die. In either case you will be doing the will of God and nothing else matters.”[13] E.M.D. finally left when she learned that Yoé was planning to join another enclosed order: "the thought of the utter and complete earthly separation that must necessarily take place between us was more than I could bear.”

At the outbreak of World War I, she worked as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment in Exeter, under the formidable command of Georgiana Buller (daughter of a general who held the Victoria Cross, and later a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire).[14] Delafield's first novel Zella Sees Herself was published in 1917. (This coincided with Elizabeth’s decision to use the first name Edmeé.)[15] At the end of the war she worked for the South-West Region of the Ministry of National Service in Bristol, and published two more novels.[16] Delafield continued to publish one or two novels every year until nearly the end of her life in 1943.[17]

On 17 July 1919, E.M.D. married Colonel Arthur Paul Dashwood, OBE, a younger son of Sir George Dashwood, 6th Baronet and Lady Mary Seymour (youngest daughter of Francis Seymour, 5th Marquess of Hertford).[18] Dashwood was an engineer who had built the massive docks at Hong Kong Harbour. After two years in the Malay States, Delafield insisted on coming back to England and they lived in Croyle, an old house in Kentisbeare, Devon, on the Bradfield estate where Dashwood became the land agent.[19] Edmeé had two children, Lionel and Rosamund.[20] At the initial meeting of the Kentisbeare Women's Institute in 1924 Delafield was unanimously elected president, and remained so until she died.[21] She also served as a Justice of the Peace from 1925.[22]

Delafield was a great admirer and champion of Charlotte M. Yonge[23] and an authority on the Brontë family about whom she wrote The Brontes, Their Lives Recorded by Their Contemporaries.[24] In 1938 Lorna Mesney became her secretary, and kept a diary to which Delafield's biographer was given access.[25]

Delafield's son Lionel died in late 1940, some suggest by his own hand, something from which she never recovered. Her own health suffered a progressive decline which necessitated a colostomy and visits to a neurologist. Three years later, on 2 December 1943, Delafield died after collapsing while lecturing in Oxford, She was buried under her favourite yew tree in Kentisbeare churchyard, near her son. Her mother survived her and died in October 1945. Her daughter, Rosamund Dashwood, emigrated to Canada.

Diary of a Provincial Lady

Delafield became great friends with Margaret Mackworth, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda, and was appointed a director of Time and Tide. When the editor 'wanted some light "middles"', preferably in serial form, Delafield promised to think of something to submit'.[26] She later said: “The idea had come into my mind of writing, in the first person singular, a perfectly straightforward account of the many disconcerting facets presented by everyday life to the average woman . . .[27] It was thus, in 1930, that her most popular and enduring work Diary of a Provincial Lady was written. This largely autobiographical novel substituted the names of "Robin" and "Vicky" for her own children, Lionel and Rosamund.[28] However, when Arthur Watts drew the character Vicky for the published book, he did not use Delafield's children as his model. Instead he drew a six-year-old girl called Faith Nottidge from a fashionable family of Chelsea. The book has never been out of print.

The novel inspired several sequels which chronicled later portions of her life: The Provincial Lady Goes Further, The Provincial Lady in America, and The Provincial Lady in War-Time. She later worked for the Ministry of Information. The Dictionary of National Biography says "On the outbreak of the Second World War, she lectured for the Ministry of Information and spent some weeks in France." However, we can surmise from The Provincial Lady in War-Time that in fact she spent quite a bit of time vainly looking for 'proper' war work and working in an ARP canteen.

In 1961, Delafield's daughter, Rosamund Dashwood, published Provincial Daughter, a semi-autobiographical account of her own experiences with domestic life in the 1950s.

Reception

Delafield was a respected and highly prolific author of middlebrow fiction in her day, along with such writers as Angela Thirkel and Agatha Christie.[29] Of her novels, only the Provincial Lady series achieved wide commercial success (The Diary of a Provincial Lady was Book Society Book of the month in December 1930),[30] though her first novel Zella Sees Herself quickly went into a second impression and produced a first royalty cheque of £50. However, Delafield’s contributions to magazines, such as Time and Tide, and Punch (which published over 400 of her pieces) made her widely known and loved in the United Kingdom. She also was quite popular in the United States and made two highly successful speaking tours there in the 1930s.[31]

Delafield’s status in Britain was such that in the early days of WW II the BBC asked her to broadcast a reassuring series called “Home is Like That,”[32] and future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan persuaded her to bring her beloved diarist out of retirement for a series later published as The Provincial Lady in Wartime.[33] Delafield’s status in England was reflected in the BBC’s choosing to announce her death on its Six O’Clock News.[34] Punch commented: “Many Punch readers have realized since her death that it was the article by E.M. Delafield that instinctively they read first each week . . . and they didn’t realize till now, when those articles have ceased, what a blank their absence would leave.”[35]

Delafield’s novels were reasonably well received, but it was her humorous magazine contributions for which she was most appreciated and is best remembered. The critic Rachel Ferguson complained that she wrote too much and her work was uneven whilst considering The Way Things Are a "completely perfect novel" and suggesting (in 1939) that "her humour and super-sensitive observation should make of her one of the best and most significant writers we possess, a comforting and timeless writer whose comments will delight a hundred years hence."[36]

The decades have proven Ferguson correct. The Times opined that Delafield was a “genuine, if modest genius” of her craft. Delafield is now often discussed along with Jane Austen as being a master of the comedy of manners, and Cynthia Zarin credits Delafield with creating the modern humorous diary. J.B. Priestley called her the equal of the best English female humorists, including Jane Austen, and allocated five pages to her in English Humor (1976). The critic Henry Canby attributed her lack of “resounding” critical success to her unpretentiousness, saying she was “one, who, like Jane Austen, seems to write easily on her lap, while others talk and clamor about her.”[37] Faye Hamel has pointed out how “enormous skill, subtlety, and power of selection have gone to create this seemingly mild and commonplace character (the Provincial Lady).[38] And Maurice McCullen has argued that Delafield’s “strength as a humorist argues most strongly for a place in English literature . . .“[39]

Books

Drama

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. See generally, “E.M. Delafield” in Encyclopedia of British Women’s Writing 1900-1950, p.66 (Palgrave, 2006). See also Chronology (unpaginated) in Maurice L. McCullen, E.M. Delafield (Dwayne, 1985)
  2. Maurice L. McCullen, E.M. Delafield, p. 62 (1985.
  3. Violet Powell, The Life of a Provincial Lady: A Study of E.M. Delafield and Her Works, pp1-2 (Henemann, 1988).
  4. Tanya Izzard, E.M. Delafield and the Feminist Middlebrow, p.32 (Ph.D. dissertation, 2014) quoting "E.M. Delafield," in Beginnings, p.74 (Thomas Nelson, 1935).
  5. Powell, p.6.
  6. McCullen, p.2. See also Kathy Mezei, "E.M. Delafield," in Modernist Archives Publishing Project, http://modernistarchives.com/person/e-m-delaifield.
  7. Powell, p.7
  8. Powell, pp.7-9, and McCullen, “Chronology.”
  9. Powell, pp. 9-10.
  10. Cynthia Zarin, “The Diarist” in "'The New Yorker (Vol. 81, No.12, May 9, 2005).
  11. Powell, p.12.
  12. Powell, pp.14.
  13. Powell, p.22.
  14. Powell, p.32
  15. Powell, p.33.
  16. Powell, pp. 37-38
  17. “E.M. Delafield” in Encyclopedia of British Women’s Writing 1900-1950, p.66.
  18. Powell, pp.16-18
  19. Powell, pp.50-55.
  20. Powell, pp. 46, 54.
  21. Powell, p.61.
  22. Powell, p.56.
  23. Powell, p.124
  24. The Diarist.
  25. Powell, p.158.
  26. Powell, pp.73-75
  27. Mather, p. 33.
  28. Mather, p.39..
  29. Mezei
  30. Powell p.99.
  31. Zarin. See also McCullen, Chronology.
  32. Mezei
  33. Powell, p.165.
  34. Powell, p. 185.
  35. Helen Walasck, "E.M. Delafield and Punch" in “Books,” Albion Magazine Online (Summer, 2019) http://www.albionmagazineonline.org (Archive).
  36. [Rebecca Ferguson]
  37. Mather, p.44, quoting Henry Seidel Canby, "The Diary of a Provincial Lady", Saturday Review of Literature, p.376, Jan. 14, 1933.
  38. Faye Hammer, "Wildest Hopes Exceeded: E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady" in Women Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars (University of Texas Press, 2007).
  39. McCullen, p.122.
  40. according to Powell op. cit. from which most of the rest of this information comes
  41. according to the EMD website
  42. The Provincial Lady Goes Further dedication page

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