Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
E. M. Delafield
-
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.