E. M. Delafield

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Standard Name: Delafield, E. M.
Birth Name: Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture
Married Name: Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood
Pseudonym: E. M. Delafield
Pseudonym: E. M. D.
Pseudonym: Sportswoman
Used Form: Edmee Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture
Used Form: Edmee Elizabeth Monica Dashwood
EMD 's charming, witty novels are characterized by acute observation and good-humoured social satire. Her stories often draw from her own experiences—as an Edwardian débutante, a novice in a religious order, a war worker, and an upper-middle-class wife and mother in a modernizing Georgian world. At her best (as in Diary of a Provincial Lady) she offers lively, amusing insights into the foibles of her own class and contemporary society at large. Often compared to Jane Austen , she has been praised for her almost uncanny gift for converting the small and familiar dullnesses of everyday life into laughter.
Beauman, Nicola, and E. M. Delafield. “Introduction”. The Diary of a Provincial Lady, Rprt ed. , Virago Press, p. vii - xvii.
xvii
She also wrote plays, short stories, literary criticism, sketches, war propaganda, and a travel book.
Black-and-white portrait of E.M. Delafield, wearing a cloche hat that gathers at one side with what looks like animal fur and an arrow brooch in the centre, 1922.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Reception E. H. Young
Though she has had no academic attention until very recently, EHY appealed to a wide readership. Her works remained steadily in print during her lifetime. Writers of blurbs for her covers included E. M. Delafield
Education Charlotte Yonge
The young CY seems to have been totally unlike her adult self: a noisy, excitable child with a great capacity for screaming.
Battiscombe, Georgina, and E. M. Delafield. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. Constable and Company.
43
Her parents followed the system of Richard and Maria Edgeworth for bringing...
Textual Features Charlotte Yonge
E. M. Delafield and others note that its heroine, Elizabeth Woodbourne, seems to be a self-portrait.
Delafield, E. M., and Georgina Battiscombe. “Introduction”. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life, Constable and Company, pp. 9-15.
9
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
E. M. Delafield writes that during the 1940s CY retained wide popularity: that the London Library 's copies of her books were often checked out by readers, and that when Delafield wrote to the Times...
Textual Features Sue Townsend
Adrian Mole carried the genes of the British talent for humour, as formerly represented by Stella Gibbons and Angela Thirkell , but in a newly anarchic and ungenteel form. Like Richmal Crompton in the William...
Textual Production Angela Thirkell
When Hamish Hamilton published an anonymous historical novel, The Bazalgettes, in 1935 while AT was researching Harriette Wilson, she was happily flattered to have it widely attributed to her. In fact it was by...
Friends, Associates Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
Neighbours and guests of CADS in Cornwall included J. D. Beresford , Dorothy Richardson , and E. M. Delafield . Noël Coward came for a miserable weekend, when he was ostracized by the family because...
Travel Gladys Henrietta Schütze
GHS later attended PEN conferences at Barcelona and Paris, in Hungary and in Poland. At Barcelona she was a joint delegate with E. M. Delafield .
Schütze, Gladys Henrietta. More Ha’pence Than Kicks. Jarrolds.
219, 221, 223
Intertextuality and Influence E. Arnot Robertson
Again the sexual content was an issue. Devlin finds both reticence and modesty in EAR , but critics found the book's sexual candour appalling, or called it crude or [r]ather too full blooded, or...
Friends, Associates Kate O'Brien
During her time at Oxford, KOB developed friendships with the Irishwoman Enid Starkie (a French scholar of note and later the holder of the Légion d'Honneur) and the English novelist E. M. Delafield . The...
Residence Kate O'Brien
By September 1942, KOB was established in Delafield 's house, Croyle, near Kentisbeare in Devon.
O’Brien, Kate. The Last of Summer. Virago.
243
She was, says Lorna Reynolds, a paying guest there; however, she was also crucially helpful to Delafield, who...
Occupation Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
Women contributors ranged widely: Rebecca West , Stella Benson , Cicely Hamilton , Members of Parliament Lady Nancy Astor and Ellen Wilkinson , Virginia Woolf , Naomi Mitchison , E. M. Delafield , Rose Macaulay
Textual Production Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
Time and Tide carried two excerpts from Woolf 's A Room of One's Own in November 1929, and the next year MHVR wrote two series of articles on the treatment of women and gender in...
Textual Features Lucas Malet
This novel takes up the story abruptly ended in The Dogs of Want. Sir Robert Syme, recently appointed a judge, has also not long ago become the husband of that novel's protagonist Barbara Heritage...
Friends, Associates Marie Belloc Lowndes
Apart from MBL 's established literary friends, there were many whose early writing she encouraged to particularly good effect: Graham Greene , Margaret Kennedy , Pamela Frankau , E. M. Delafield , and L. P. Hartley .
Elizabeth Northcote, Countess of Iddesleigh, et al. “List of Books by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Foreword”. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947, edited by Susan Lowndes Marques and Susan Lowndes Marques, Chatto and Windus, pp. prelims, 1 - 3.
2

Timeline

14 May 1920: Time and Tide began publication, offering...

Building item

14 May 1920

Time and Tide began publication, offering a feminist approach to literature, politics, and the arts: Naomi Mitchison called it the first avowedly feminist literary journal with any class, in some ways ahead of its time.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz.
168

6-11 December 1922: Edith Thompson and her younger lover Frederick...

Building item

6-11 December 1922

Edith Thompson and her younger lover Frederick Bywaters were tried for the murder of her husband, Percy Thompson .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

31 August 1939: The British Government issued an evacuation...

National or international item

31 August 1939

The British Government issued an evacuation notice to be carried out within twenty-four hours; within three days, in fact, a million and a half children, pregnant women, and the blind were moved from their urban...

8 May 2008: Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago...

Women writers item

8 May 2008

Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago Modern Classics by re-issuing works by Barbara Pym , E. M. Delafield , Elizabeth Taylor , Jacqueline Susann , Muriel Spark , Helene Hanff , Zora Neale Hurston , and Angela Carter .

Texts

Delafield, E. M. "Faster! Faster!". Macmillan, 1936.
Delafield, E. M. Challenge to Clarissa. Macmillan, 1931.
Battiscombe, Georgina, and E. M. Delafield. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. Constable and Company, 1943.
Delafield, E. M. Consequences. Hodder & Stoughton, 1919.
Delafield, E. M., and Arthur Watts. Diary of a Provincial Lady. Macmillan, 1930.
Delafield, E. M. Gay Life. Macmillan, 1933.
Delafield, E. M. General Impressions. Macmillan, 1933.
Delafield, E. M., and Georgina Battiscombe. “Introduction”. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life, Constable and Company, 1943, pp. 9-15.
Beauman, Nicola, and E. M. Delafield. “Introduction”. The Diary of a Provincial Lady, Rprt ed. , Virago Press, 1984, p. vii - xvii.
Delafield, E. M. Ladies and Gentlemen in Victorian Fiction. Hogarth Press, 1937.
Delafield, E. M. Late and Soon. Macmillan, 1943.
Delafield, E. M. Love Has No Resurrection, and Other Stories. Macmillan, 1939.
Delafield, E. M. Messalina of the Suburbs. Hutchinson, 1923.
Delafield, E. M. No One Now Will Know. Macmillan, 1941.
Delafield, E. M. Nothing Is Safe. Macmillan, 1937.
Delafield, E. M. People You Love. Collins, 1940.
Borden, Mary et al. “Preface”. Diary of a Provincial Lady, Harper, 1931, p. ix - xi.
Delafield, E. M. Straw Without Bricks. Macmillan, 1937.
Delafield, E. M. Thank Heaven Fasting. Macmillan, 1932.
Delafield, E. M. The Bazalgettes. Hamish Hamilton, 1935.
Delafield, E. M., and Nicola Beauman. The Diary of a Provincial Lady. Virago, 1984.
Delafield, E. M. The Glass Wall. Gollancz, 1933.
Delafield, E. M. The Optimist. Hutchinson, 1922.
Delafield, E. M. The Optimist. Macmillan, 1922.
Delafield, E. M. The Pelicans. Heinemann, 1918.