The Diary of a Provincial Lady

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This flight of satire rather spoilt by Lady B, laughing heartily, and saying that I am always so amusing. Lady B makes determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoal, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa. And so, in her beautiful house in Devonshire, she began to note down the routine follies and storms in teacups of life in the provinces. The family’s house appears to stand in the only grounds capable of hosting open-air church events, and has a home farm where they send for extra eggs or cream when a visitor comes to stay. Sofia Petrovna, which we have just published, opens with the line, "After the death of her husband, Sofia Petrovna took a course in typing".

We recommend it to any Persephone reader who loved, for example, Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love because, as the Afterword to the Diary observes: ‘Self-deprecation of this kind is a particularly English occupation, one which foreigners find rather hard to understand.Over time, she imagines various ways of murdering Lady Boxe: “(Unavoidable Query presents itself here: Would a verdict of Justifiable Homicide delivered against their mother affect future careers of children unfavourably?

ILLUSTRATIONS "Robert reads the Times" Cook Mademoiselle The Rector "Very, very distinguished novelist" The Vicar's Wife Lady B.

The Provincial Lady’s chief worries, aside from her children, are the household bills and bank overdrafts. India Knight once said that she ‘re-read for the nth time E M Delaifled’s dry, caustic Diary of a Provincial Lady and howled with laughter’.

This largely autobiographical novel substituted the names of "Robin" and "Vicky" for her own children, Lionel and Rosamund.The book is presented as a series of diary entries, capturing the Provincial Lady’s unfiltered thoughts and observations as she goes about her business – mostly domestic or community-based in nature as she attempts to oversee the running of the house. Unfortunately Vicky comes into the drawing-room and says: ‘O Mummie are those the bulbs we got at Woolworths? It’s written in the form of a diary by a narrator who gradually reveals herself to be a 35-ish married woman living in deepest Devon at the beginning of the 1930s. I love this and the other three; I have them in the Virago omnibus paperback edition and have read them right through a number of times.