As requested, EMD, mi thorts
Since I received two requests to go on about E M Delafield -
Though I'm sure I've probably covered some of these points already, and more than once -
E M Delafield =/= The Provincial Lady
Paul Dashwood =/= 'Robert'. (They met after he wrote her a fan-letter about one of her books. We doubt Robert ever reads anything that isn't either the newspaper or strictly work-related. My own feeling is that Paul was probably completely in on the Robert joke, including sitting for the illos.)
A confusion that just about all biographers and critics have succumbed to. You'd think they'd never read anything else by EMD: most of her other works are not 'gentle whimsical humour' about life in a small village with a bossy Lady B, Vicar's Wife, wossname with the domineering mother, etc. Some of her books are bleak, bleak indeed (Consequences; Thank Heaven Fasting) and she is seldom very cosy. Merciless is more the word that springs to mind.
It also sounds as though some of her ghastly busy-busy women are at least as much how she feared she was as the ever-embarrassed PL, because she really was quite the dynamo, with the books and the journalism and the Women's Institute, and so on.
Even in her more comic mode, 'gentle' is not the word: she could be excoriatingly withering about a whole range of social types.
I'm not sure she had a huge social range, class-wise, as opposed to different types. I found The Suburban Young Man a bit unanchored in any specific suburbia. A Messalina of the Suburbs is notably less sympathetic to its Edith Thompson analogue than F Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow.
Some of her books have fairly coded allusion to sapphic passions, though in What is Love? she totally subverts the Radclyffe Hall paradigm in that Vicky has cropped hair, a monocle, severe tailored clothes, athletic competence and a forthright attitude and is nonetheless both heterosexual, and, we are given to understand, actually more attractive to men than her beautiful and conventionally feminine cousin Ellie (though we also get her genuine protective love for Ellie).
I wonder a little about EMD herself: the biographical line is that she was the object of Kate O'Brien's affections but was a married lady (which one feels is neither here nor there, so was Vita Sackville-West). She was certainly part of the somewhat terrifying circle around the feminist periodical Time and Tide - Rebecca! Naomi! Winifred! not to mention Lady Rhondda herself (Vera not so much part of the circle, because tensions between her and Lady R as to which one of them really was Winifred's BFF) - and there was a lot of complex emotional entanglement going on in and around that circle.
I wish there was a better biography and more good critical work about her.
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