This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.
If you were guessing which author I’d be using for D in this series, you’d probably have put money on Delafield. Diary of a Provincial Lady is one of my favourite books and among the few I’ve re-read several times. But there is much more to Delafield than that series, as this post will show!
How many books do I have by EM Delafield?
In this picture, I forgot to include the Persephone Delafields and a couple of the Viragos, and I have lent one of her books elsewhere, but you can see that I have quite a few! Though this pic is a bit misleading. Because the pile on the left is entirely duplicates of the Provincial Lady series. It’s my one weakness when it comes to duplicates. So, all told I have 38 books by E.M. Delafield, eleven of which are the Provincial Lady series. So a total of 31 really. (NOTE: The Provincial Lady in Russia is not in that pile because it’s not a proper PL book – it’s an opportunistic retitling of Straw Without Bricks: I Visit Soviet Russia.)
How many of these have I read?
The pile on the right are the ones I’ve not read, but I have read a few Delafields that I don’t own – so the total I’ve read is 25. And there are a handful of her books I haven’t managed to track down.
How did I start reading Delafield?
Most people come to her through Diary of a Provincial Lady, but I first encountered her in a little book called Modern Humour, which I’d bought because it featured a sketch by A.A. Milne. At this point – maybe 2002? – I knew very little about authors at all, and so was reading it rather blind. And I knew nothing about E.M. Delafield when I read the two sketches featured – which turned out to be from the very excellent As Others Hear Us.
My local library had a good store of old Delafields, but the first one I read was from the open shelves – a large print edition of The Provincial Lady Goes Further – also know as The Provincial Lady in London. It might not be the traditional route to her, to read the second in a series in an enormous font, but it got me hooked and I haven’t looked back.
General impressions…
Delafield is one of those authors who really helped shape my literary taste, coming across her as a teenager and finding there was a lot to explore. And I love her just as much now – when I’ve lived twice as long. I think I’ll be reading her for the rest of my life.
She is so good at being funny – we all know that. She’s also exceptionally good at more melancholy and poignant books. Novels like Faster! Faster! and The Way Things Are can shine a light on contemporary social anxieties. I think she’s at her best when she’s using her observational skills for comedy – not just the Provincial Lady, but the sketches in As Others Hear Us and, appropriately for this section of the post, General Impressions.
And, as with A.A. Milne and Richmal Crompton, it was fun to get addicted to an author whose books take a bit of tracking down. As with last time, I started collecting when they were a bit easier to find online at an affordable price – but it still took a bit of hunting, and more satisfaction for the book hunter than if I could just have bought everything straight off the shelf of Waterstones.
And I’m rather hoping she can be included in the British Library Women Writers series… watch this space.