E. M. Delafield

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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, 1984, p. vii - xvii.
xvii
She also wrote plays, short stories, literary criticism, sketches, war propaganda, and a travel book.
Black-and-white portrait of E.M. Delafield, wearing a cloche hat that gathers at one side with what looks like animal fur and an arrow brooch in the centre, 1922.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Charlotte Yonge
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, 1943, pp. 9-15.
9
Textual Features Penelope Fitzgerald
PF 's letters are highly observant of the people around her, often satirically, sometimes lovingly. From long before she became an author, she was using her letters to craft both character and narrative. Rosemary Hill...
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...
Textual Production Margaret Haig Viscountess Rhondda
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 Production Storm Jameson
Jameson had been approached by the Ministry of Information once the USA had entered World War II, for suggestions on how to cement Anglo-American relations.
Jameson, Storm. Journey from the North. Harper and Row, 1970.
524
The resulting volume includes work by Phyllis Bentley ,...
Textual Production Margery Lawrence
ML 's ghost stories have been frequently anthologised. They appear in, for instance, Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told (1937), The Virago Book of Ghost Stories: The Twentieth Century (1987), and Vampire Stories (1993).
Clute, John, and John, 1949 - Grant, editors. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. St Martin’s Press, 1997.
under Lawrence, Margery
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

Timeline

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Texts

Delafield, E. M. Thank Heaven Fasting. Macmillan, 1932.
Delafield, E. M. The Bazalgettes. Hamish Hamilton, 1935.
Delafield, E. M. The Brontës: Their Lives Recorded by Their Contemporaries. Hogarth Press, 1935.
Delafield, E. M. The Chip and the Block. Hutchinson, 1925.
Delafield, E. M., and Nicola Beauman. The Diary of a Provincial Lady. Rpt. ed., Virago, 1984.
Delafield, E. M. The Entertainment. Hutchinson, 1927.
Delafield, E. M. The Glass Wall. Gollancz, 1933.
Delafield, E. M. The Heel of Achilles. Hutchinson, 1921.
Delafield, E. M. The Optimist. Hutchinson, 1922.
Delafield, E. M. The Optimist. Macmillan, 1922.
Delafield, E. M. The Pelicans. Heinemann, 1918.
Delafield, E. M., and Arthur Watts. The Provincial Lady Goes Further. Macmillan, 1932.
Delafield, E. M., and Margaret Freeman. The Provincial Lady in America. Macmillan, 1934.
Delafield, E. M. The Provincial Lady in Wartime. Macmillan, 1940.
Delafield, E. M. The Suburban Young Man. Hutchinson, 1928.
Delafield, E. M. The War-Workers. Heinemann, 1918.
Delafield, E. M. The Way Things Are. Hutchinson, 1927.
Delafield, E. M. The Way Things Are. Harper, 1928.
Delafield, E. M. Three Marriages. Macmillan, 1939.
Galsworthy, John. Time and Tide Album. Editor Delafield, E. M., Hamish Hamilton, 1932.
Delafield, E. M. “To See Ourselves”. Famous Plays of 1931, Gollancz, 1931.
Delafield, E. M. Turn Back the Leaves. Macmillan, 1930.
Delafield, E. M. What is Love?. Macmillan, 1928.
Delafield, E. M. Women Are Like That. Macmillan, 1929.
Delafield, E. M. Zella Sees Herself. Heinemann, 1917.