‘November 7th. Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfully, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down . . . Do I know, she asks, how very late it is for indoor bulbs?’
We’re in the drawing-room of an under-heated middle-class home, far from any city, on a chilly November day in 1929 and our diarist – the Provincial Lady of the title – is dealing with a bossy acquaintance who has arrived unexpectedly and is telling her how to do something she knows how to do perfectly well. Lady Boxe, her neighbour from the local great house, is one of a cast of headache-inducing characters who inhabit this deathless diary, including Ethel the clumsy house-parlourmaid, and Cook, who has just announced that ‘something is wrong with the range’, the PL’s husband, unemotional and uncommunicative Robert, and her children, runny-nosed 6-year-old Vicky and 10-year-old Robin, home briefly from his prep-school and bringing a friend who is eating them out of house and home.
The Diary of a Provincial Lady, which has many echoes of E. M. Delafield’s own life, first appeared in instalments in Time and Tide, then in book form in 1930. It was an immediate hit, speaking as it did to the millions of middle-class wives trapped in dull conventional marriages, struggling to pay the bills and keep up appearances in those difficult inter-war years. For us, the setting is different, but the emotions are all too familiar, and the brisk, unself-pitying voice of the Provincial Lady still rings true. Her fictional diary is a funny, wryly observed picture of a marriage between the wars, and its spirit lives on in all those journalistic columns describing life in the ‘squeezed middle’ today.
Making the Best of It
Within seconds of starting to read, you’ll be there with her, in the under-heated marital home far from any city, on a chilly 7 November 1929.
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