LCA
's mother, Mary
, Lady Wemyss, was born a Wyndham, a descendent of the writer Félicité, Mme de Genlis
, and of her royal lover Philippe Egalité
, Duc d'Orléans (who was also father...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Having joined the army, Herbert Asquith
had a spell at a training camp on Salisbury Plain before being posted to the Front in France. By August 1916 he was feeling as if he would...
Textual Production
Lady Cynthia Asquith
This volume contained a selection of what LCA
had written during these years. Her family very nearly decided to cut, as too personal and harrowing, a passage about the grief of her sister-in-law Lady Violet (Letty) Charteris
Roger Fulford
, reviewing it for the Times Literary Supplement, situated it among a crowd of works looking back from difficult times to an easier and...
Family and Intimate relationships
Sir J. M. Barrie
Without children of his own, Barrie had a habit of monopolising the children of friends, for whom he invented elaborate games. Among children so situated were Bevil Quiller-Couch
(who was later the fiancé of the...
Family and Intimate relationships
Ann Bridge
At that time the Foreign Office, working in London, was distinct from the Diplomatic Service
, working abroad. It was not until after the First World War that Owen O'Malley became a diplomat overseas. He...
Textual Production
Ann Bridge
Nicola Beauman
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that AB
's writing (under the pseudonym she chose for the sake of the concealment necessary for a Foreign Office wife) began with articles, poems...
Literary responses
Ann Bridge
A British Foreign Office
official warned that what he called the uniform unpleasantness of the Spanish characters (which was news to her: was he responding to the fact that people behave badly in extreme circumstances?)...
Literary responses
E. M. Delafield
Critic Nicola Beauman
sees this as EMD
's most cruelly satirical novel.
Beauman, Nicola, and E. M. Delafield. “Introduction”. The Diary of a Provincial Lady, Rprt ed. , Virago Press, p. vii - xvii.
xii
Textual Features
E. M. Delafield
The plot centres on a married woman's love for another man.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Critic Nicola Beauman
finds that EMD
's satirical tone in this and other novels encourages the reader both to sympathize with and to devalue...
Literary responses
E. M. Delafield
Nicola Beauman
judges this one of EMD
's best novels.
Publishing
E. M. Delafield
The book is dedicated to the editor and directors of Time and Tide. Its many reprints include those with introductions by Nicola Beauman
and by Jilly Cooper
.
Literary responses
E. M. Delafield
Nicola Beauman
judges that EMD
succeeds in speaking to two different kinds of readers here: those who share the heroine's views of marriage and those who recognize the element of satire in them.
Beauman, Nicola, and E. M. Delafield. “Introduction”. The Diary of a Provincial Lady, Rprt ed. , Virago Press, p. vii - xvii.
After beginning her trip smoothly, Diana is surprised by a Sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan, who kidnaps and rapes her. But EMH
provides a troubling confluence of passion and male aggression, carefully blurring the line between...
Textual Features
E. M. Hull
Marny is Carew's counterpart because of her dismal experience of marriage. His wife was unfaithful; her husband was abusive (he struck her, the whole weight of his powerful body behind the smashing blow that...
Timeline
September 1998: Literary historian Nicola Beauman founded...
Women writers item
September 1998
Literary historian Nicola Beauman
founded Persephone Books
, aimed at reprinting in beautiful format forgotten classics by twentieth-century (mostly women) writers.