E M Delafield (1890-1943)

E M Delafield was the pen name of Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture, a well-known novelist of the 20s and 30s. She was from a middle class background, and her mother was also a novelist.  She was a debutante in 1909, but a few years later, went into a Roman Catholic order of nuns.  Why she did this has never been explained.  However after a few years, she left…and when the War broke out, she worked as a VAD.  This gave her a wider experience of life than was usual for an upper or middle class girl at the time.  She began to write, first producing a novel about her time as a VAD. (Zella Sees Herself).
After the war, she married into the lower ranks of the landed gentry.  Paul Dashwood, her husband had been in the army and was an engineer, and his family had the title of Baronet.  He and his wife went out to the Malay states on marriage, as did many British professionals with such practical skills. She wanted to come back to England, and within a few years, they moved back to Devon where her husband got a job as estate manager to the Bradfield estate.  Delafield went on with her writing -but was very involved with the local society circle, the Women’s Institute etc.      
Like many of her heroines of her books about married life, she was something of a fish out of water, in the genteel upper middle or gentry circles of provincial England.  She was more intellectual than the women she mixed with.  They thought of her as odd because of her writing; her writing friends who came to stay didn’t usually win the admiration of her children.  Her marriage seems to have been happy enough –but all the same her view of marriage seems a little jaundiced.  In many of her novels about marriage, the “husband” is a dull man who loves his wife but is irritated by her, has few interests in common with her, and retreats behind his newspaper.  So it is possible that her marriage was not a close one, in that sense.

In the next part of this blog, I hope to write something about one of Delafield’s best novels, “Thank Heaven Fasting”.