E. M. Delafield (1890–1943) was a British novelist, born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture. With a delicate yet biting touch, she portrayed the daily lives and emotional predicaments of middle- and upper-class Englishwomen between the two world wars, excelling at diary form and irony to reveal her characters' self-deception and social pressure. Her best-known work, Diary of a Provincial Lady, uses the diary form to depict a country housewife's vanity and anxiety, earning her a place in the tradition of English humorous writing. The library also holds her works The War-Workers, which concerns wartime social roles, and Consequences, which explores a woman's choice between marriage and independence. Public information is limited; her fiction centers on women's circumstances, class manners, and family relations, written in a light tone with an undercurrent of critique, and has influenced later women's writing and satirical fiction.
