3. E.M. Delafield - Diary of a Provincial Lady

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AMY HELMES, HOST:

Hello, and welcome to The Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW, HOST:

And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of young adult novels, and we’re here to shed a little light on some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Today we’re taking a look at a famous fictional “diary” from the 1930s, one richly and hilariously rendered by author E.M. Delafield. 

AMY: If you’ve never heard of her, we're going to catch you up to speed, and we can assure you that rifling through her character’s private diary does NOT disappoint. So let’s raid the stacks and get started.

INTRO MUSIC.

AMY: So Kim, you have a 17-month old daughter at home. How is she doing? How’s your week been?

KIM: You know, the usual… (the usual during a pandemic, I should say). I got really excited about doing this socially-distant walk at the Hollywood Reservoir last Friday, so I pictured this beautiful location. I dressed her really cute… It was the hottest day of the year; I was overheated wearing a facemask. She was overheated, too. She was kind of whiny and miserable, and she kept wanting to walk back to the parking lot, so we ended up spending most of our time in the parking lot looking for rocks. She ended up having a great time, but it isn’t exactly what I imagined it would be.

AMY: That’s like they say, “God laughs when you have plans.” I think maybe toddlers do as well.

KIM: That makes sense. I have to try to remember that. What about you? How are things going with your elementary-school-aged children at home?

AMY: Well, we’ve had some adventures in the kitchen this week. My 8-year-old son, Jack, decided he wanted to bake, which is always like giving your kid a hand grenade and letting them trash the kitchen. I let him do it, but I was like, “You’re on your own, buddy. You figure it out.” So he made chocolate chip cookies. They were delicious, but he forgot to put baking soda or baking powder — one of those — in the mix, so it all came out like one big giant pancake of a cookie. It all kind of melted together. Then my 10-year-old daughter, Julia, one morning… she was making a Pop Tart (because we’ve devolved into eating Pop Tarts in this house during the pandemic.) I walked into the kitchen and was like, “Julia, where’s your Pop Tart that you made?” She said, “It was too hot, so I threw it in the garbage.” It was just like, “Where did I go wrong with this child?” I looked in the garbage and there was a complete Pop Tart that was ever-so-slightly singed on the ends.

KIM: She’s too smart for her own good. That’s it. Because she is one really smart cookie.

AMY: I don’t know. Maybe just not as a cook.

KIM: I think it’s pretty safe to say that for every joy of motherhood there’s an equal and opposite moment of wanting to bang your head against a wall.

AMY: It’s almost like if you can’t laugh about it sometimes, you just might cry. And it pretty much applies to every facet of life, and it’s something that E.M. Delafield really succeeds in showcasing in her book Diary of a Provincial Lady.

KIM: You are so right. But before we get into it, let’s talk a little bit E.M. Delafield. Who was she?

AMY: All right, so I’m going to give you the quick hits. She was a master of satire who published more than 40 books over a 26-year writing career. She was born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture (how’s that for a name?) in 1890, and she grew up in Sussex, England, as part of an aristocratic French Catholic family. Her father was a count...

KIM: Wow.

AMY: ...and her mother was a well-known novelist and dramatist of her day who wrote under the name Mrs. Henry de La Pasture (I looked her up. I found 14 titles for her listed on Goodreads including her best-known children’s book, The Unhappy Family.) So Edmee (or Elizabeth as she was known later in life) adopted the pen name Delafield as a nod to her maiden surname (de la Pasture). Kind of clever, huh?

KIM: That’s great.

AMY: Her first novel was published in 1917, called Zella Sees Herself . And then she  continued to publish one or two novels a year for the rest of her life, basically, or until nearly the end of her life. At the age of 29, in 1919, she married civil engineer Arthur “Paul” (I guess he went by Paul) Dashwood, and they moved to a little village called Kentisbeare in Devon, England. They lived on the Bradfield Estate where her husband was  the land agent, and this is where she became the proverbial “provincial lady, ” as this is where we start to see her life falling in line with the narrator of Diary of a Provincial Lady. By the 1930s, Delafield was also moving in more literary circles. She wrote for the progressive literary review magazine Time and Tide, and that is where Diary of a Provincial Lady first appeared in serial installments.  Like the narrator of the diary, Delafield has two children, Lionel and Rosamund. As an adult, Rosamund went on to follow in her mother’s footsteps and wrote a 1950s version of her mother’s successful diary which she called Provincial Daughter. So it’s really interesting, I think, that three generations of women in the de la Pasture family became published authors . Edmee’s son, Lionel, however, died tragically as an adult (possibly by his own hand) as an adult in WWII. Edmee really only outlived him by only a few years. She died in 1943, only 13 years after finding great success with Diary of a Provincial Lady.

KIM: When I saw that, I was so surprised. I had to look twice. I couldn’t believe the book that we’re going to be talking about was written and published and set in the 1930s, not that long before she actually passed away. So a few more interesting things that we found:  In her youth she dreamed of becoming a Catholic nun, which I guess isn’t that surprising for someone raised Catholic, but it does maybe show a little bit of a romantic streak in her. She entered a Belgian convent at the age of 21, but she only lasted 18 months there. She decided that her sister, who was entering another convent, she didn’t want to be so separated from her sister, so she decided not to do it after about 18 months. But she wrote a book about her experience there called Brides of Heaven. I actually would love to read that. I put it on my list. But just think, had she stayed, we wouldn’t have Diary of a Provincial Lady. So that was God’s loss, our gain!

AMY: Exactly. Also, like me, Delafield was fascinated with true crime stories, and she wrote a fictionalized account of a very British scandal, the Edith Thompson-Freddy Bywaters murder case. The book she wrote was called Messaline of the Suburbs, and I have to say, I just picked it up on hold from the library this afternoon, and I’m like a fourth of the way through it already. It is juicy and good, and if we do a future E.M. Delafield podcast a couple years from now when we roll back around to her, this might have to be the book we do, because I’m super into it.

KIM: That sounds great.

AMY: The same English scandal was actually fictionalized again by author Sarah Waters in 2014, who wrote a book about this same case called The Paying Guests, and I highly recommend that book as well.

KIM: I read that too and I loved it! I also want to mention that Delafield was an authority on the Bronte sisters and wrote a biography on them in 1935. So once again, a woman after our own heart in terms of her interests. Things just keep popping up that endear her to us. 

AMY: Absolutely, and so prolific, it seems like.

KIM: Yes. So if you really want to get a sense of Delafield’s life, you really only need to turn to this famous “diary” for a bit of insight. There are several books that make up the diaries of her fictional character. The [first] book, though satirical, really draws on her daily small-town life in Devon and it features this  non-stop, dry-witted social commentary on human nature and human interactions, including marriage, friendships and the trials of raising children. 

AMY: There was actually, Kim, an article in The Guardian a few months ago (in May) written by Kathryn Hughes and the title was “I wish more people would read … The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield.” I sort of did this “Yes!” in my head, because I have felt the same way for so long. The article wonders why the book isn’t more widely read and it suggests that the title seems too “dusty and quaint. Would you agree with that?

KIM: Yeah, I mean, just seeing the title completely on its own without any context, I think it would be really easy to think, “Oh, this is this boring, nonfiction diary of someone completely unrelatable.” Of course, now that I’ve read it and I know the voice of the diarist and how entertaining she is… AND I know the title is tongue-in-cheek... the diarist is called “provincial” by someone as an insult. She’s kind of turning it around and using it as the title of the diary. I think if we could come up with some other name like… I don’t know what it would be… but we could come up with another title that would actually, I think, make people realize what this diary is truly like to read.

AMY: I definitely would say that this book, it had to have influenced Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary.

KIM: Oh, yeah. I would be shocked if it didn’t.

AMY: Right. There’s even that scene that she has that’s very similar to the “Tarts and Vicars” party in Bridget Jones. The narrator of the diary receives a sort of vaguely-worded invite to a maybe/possibly fancy dress party. And all the ladies in town are in a tizzy about whether to show up in costume or not. How many times have you had that happen to you, Kim, whether it’s a Halloween party or some sort of dress-up theme party, and you’re wondering, “Am I going to be the only one?”

KIM: Absolutely. The idea of what to wear, I mean, you can pretty much take that into your daily life. It’s perfect. We’re actually going to go into a little more of that scene, which I loved, later. Amy, what did you really like about the diary format? 

AMY: I think the diary format, first of all, makes it a really easy book to read. It’s in quick portions, so if you are a busy wife and mom, like we are, and you’re pressed for time, you can sort of just get this book in little bite-sized bits. It’s sort of sectioned into these little pithy vignettes. And the diary itself even seems dashed off. She doesn’t use a lot of articles like “the” or “a” … it’s almost  as if she’s so busy she just hurried to write down about her day, however funny. And then so much of the diary deals with the mundane, but she keeps you hanging on her every word.

KIM: She has these little asides, and she uses “query,” “memo,” “nota bene” to make little notes to herself, and it’s hilarious. In fact some of those, I noted, ended up being the most memorable quotes of the book.

AMY: It’s almost her way of “breaking the fourth wall” with the reader because that’s the moment where you feel like she’s talking right to you even though it’s a diary. In that sense, it so reminded me of the TV show “Fleabag,” which, Kim, I know you haven’t had a chance to watch yet because you had a baby last year and TV marathons just aren’t high on your priority list these days, but that sort of tone and humor that Phoebe Waller-Bridge brings to that show is exactly the kind of snark and comedy that we find in this book.  

KIM: I cannot wait to watch that show eventually. 

AMY: You’ll love it. Okay, so, our narrator is never explicitly named in the book, actually, so we don’t know very much about her history prior to the events taking place in the diary. What do you make of that, Kim?

KIM: It’s really interesting. I mean, the diary format kind of allows her to do that because it really lends itself to focusing on the day to day. So she doesn’t mention her parents or her previous life. There’s talk about politics, but not really much about what’s actually going on— there are allusions to reading All Quiet on the Western Front, there’s some allusions to communism and socialism, but the diary is very in the moment of her life and family and their day-to-day challenges which I think is curious but it also helps make it really timeless and comforting. We’ve said the character is autobiographical, and we’ve also said that this book feels really quintessentially English, but then you take the biography that we’ve talked about: Delafield’s father was a count, his family fled the French Revolution, she was also Catholic. I’m just guessing here, but maybe she was a little romantic as well, because as I said, she wanted to go to a convent. Maybe I’m projecting that romanticism, but I feel like there’s a little bit of that there. So I think all these things maybe made her, on one level, a bit of an outsider, and I think that worked in her favor because she was really able to see, clearly, this Englishness and the reserve and the absurdity of all of it and really have fun with it. And I think that comes across in the diary.    

AMY: Yeah. She’s very observant about so many different little nuanced things about society and relationships. You mentioned her French background… she grew up with a series of French governesses, did you know that?

KIM: I did not know that. Oooh, intriguing!

AMY: And that was directly translated into this diary with the character’s children’s nurse, “Mademoiselle,” who is French.

KIM: I love her!

AMY: Oh, I know. She is such a hoot, and is always getting on our narrator’s last nerve but in a very funny way.  And I keep saying, “our narrator,” because she doesn’t have a name, but that almost seems fitting, in a way, because the character seems to be struggling a bit with her identity as a wife and mother. She’s got this single friend, Rose, who lives in London who seems to be living this sort of “Bright Young Things,” sophisticated, alternate life that she might have lived had she made different choices. It’s mentioned at one point, by her husband, that she and Rose were once roommates in London living the Bohemian life, so it’s clear that she did give all that up, and there’s a definite sense of “fear of missing out” that the narrator has whenever they hang out. There’s a little passage that illustrates that. She writes:

July 3rd — Breakfast enlivened by letter from dear Rose written at, apparently, earthly paradise of blue sea and red rocks, on South Coast of France. She says that she is having complete rest, and enjoying congenial society of charming group of friends, and makes unprecedented suggestion that I should join her for a fortnight. I am moved to exclaim — perhaps rather thoughtlessly — that the most wonderful thing in the world must be to be a childless widow — but this is met by unsympathetic silence from Robert, which recalls me to myself, and impels me to say that that isn’t in the least what I meant.

So funny!

KIM:  I love that passage! It cracked me up when you were reading it just now, too, as you can hear. It’s too funny, and it is also, really, very Bridget Jones.

AMY: Bridget Jones in reverse. Bridget Jones is looking to find a husband, and in some sense, she’s wistful about the life that she had before her husband.

KIM: I love that, you’re exactly right. That’s great. That fear of missing out that we just saw here is also so perfectly illustrated in the Italian Art Exhibition gag that’s going throughout the book. Everyone she runs into seems to have been to this exhibit except her, and she doesn’t want to admit that she hasn’t seen it.

AMY: She cannot help herself. She is just lie upon lie upon lie whenever anybody asks her, “Oh, have you been to the Italian Art Exhibition?”  It’s so hilarious to see how she’s constantly dissembling so that she doesn’t have to admit she hasn’t been to it. She’s both jealous that she hasn’t been, and also seriously annoyed at having to hear about it from everyone she knows. (Sort of in the same way that you’re annoyed when somebody tells you over and over that you have to read or watch something, like I do with this book.) If she was a modern-day woman, she would feel like the lady who just wants to stay home and watch some Bravo TV, but she feels like she OUGHT to be going to MoCA’s latest exhibit to feel cultured and sophisticated. 

KIM: I’ve so been there. I get that feeling a hundred percent. The more people tell you to do it the more, almost, you just get sick of hearing about it.

AMY: Yeah. She was just highly irritated by the whole thing by the end, but still lied and said she went, or she would just change the subject, deftly, to get out of having to answer one way or the other. I think there’s a touch of “Jane Austen” in this book that bubbles up in the colorful personalities of the other characters that are sprinkled throughout. Delafield certainly was pretty skilled at carving out some similar archetypes to the Austen characters. So we see the condescending snob in Lady Boxe, who is the grand dame who lives on the estate. We find the sort of pathetic drip of a woman in her acquaintance Cissy Crabbe. We see the self-righteous “barnacle” of a woman in the Vicar’s wife, who always claims she has to leave but she always winds up staying for forty more minutes, and she always overstays her welcome. Then there’s also this revolving door of indignant and impertinent servants who the narrator has to manage. I think she’s almost a little frightened of them frankly!

KIM: I mean, that’s an entire job in itself, managing the servants. They get worked up and then she gets worked up and it just keeps going on and on. 

AMY: She’s constantly having to run around to replace them when they quit and manage their emotions and their volatile tempers.

KIM: It manages to make somebody who has a house full of servants completely relatable because of all these things that she’s dealing with with them. She doesn’t show the ease of having servants. 

AMY: Exactly. You’d think, like, “Oh, she’s got a house full of servants!” but she ends up being like that woman in the “Calgon, take me away!” commercial from when we were kids, right?  

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: She’s always exasperated and pulling her hair out and at her wits’ end.

KIM: So, she’s got such a scathing private take on everyone that we get to peek into, but outwardly, she’s able to keep up this smiling, polished veneer that she shows people. And while she’s brutally honest (about both them and herself) within the pages of the diary, in real life, she is a great liar. She lies to get out of social engagements, she lies about how much she’s enjoying things, she lies about the books she’s read… she adores her children but she pretends having this modern, blase attitude. She writes for a feminist publication, but she doesn’t live as some of the feminists think she should. She has this literary knowledge and loves dropping literary references, but feels like she sounds ridiculous. She’s struggling to look and be this person she can never be. That makes her very universal, I think. 

AMY: She feels like a sham a lot of the time.

KIM: Yes, it’s like Imposter Syndrome before it had a name.

AMY: Yes, exactly, and so that makes any garden party or tennis match or, you know, acquaintanceships, the Women’s Institute meetings, they’re all so awkward in many ways, because she’s struggling on so many levels while interacting with her own insecurities, other people’s snobbishness and judgments of her.

KIM: Absolutely, and I think it gives you that tension that you would have otherwise from a normally-plotted novel. This has recurring themes, but it doesn’t have a traditional plot. But this tension in everyday things, from the Vicar’s wife’s quick visit to the house to buying a hat, it becomes fraught with tension and that makes it, you know, inherently readable. 

AMY: I love that she’s always thinking up witty comebacks or winning arguments with people long after they have gone home when she’s in bed staring at the ceiling. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve won those arguments.

KIM: I’ve been there! Probably staring at my ceiling at the same time in the middle of the night. And she’s second-guessing everything she did and said at a party later that night and beating herself up about that. Been there, too. She’s also, like most of us are, an incurable gossip, along with most of the other ladies she encounters. At one point she writes:

   Am disconcerted to find that Cook and I have been talking our heads off for the better part of forty minutes before I remember that gossip is both undignified and undesirable.

AMY: It’s a perfect example of her telling you the unvarnished truth — we were just gossiping our fool heads off — and then collecting herself very prim and properly and remembering how undignified it is, and “I’m going to stop that.” She’s also really brilliant, I think, at highlighting so many emotions that just feel universal no matter what time period you live in. So, that conversational awkwardness with other people… the inclination to self-aggrandize.... dreading certain obligations in life… saying yes to things that inwardly you really don’t want to do but you’re too wimpy to just say no.

KIM: So speaking of conversational awkwardness, I know that you have a really interesting theory about that, and I think people would like to hear it right about now.

AMY: Yeah, this came to mind when Iwas reading the book because she has so many allusions to tennis. She’s got a tennis court. Her cat is named after a famous 1930s tennis player, Helen Wills. There’s a whole scene where she goes to a tennis party and she’s mortified because she’s a terrible tennis player and it just makes everything so awkward. But those references just reminded me that I have a theory that conversation partners can be compared to the game of tennis. So there’s three types of conversation partners. The first is a fellow tennis player. If you’re having a conversation with a fellow tennis player, everything’s going great. You’re hitting the ball back and forth, you’re having fun, it’s moving, it’s fast-paced, it’s getting something and you’re giving something in return. Kim, I would say you are a fellow tennis player to me when it comes to conversation.

KIM: Phew, that’s a relief!

AMY: Okay, the second conversation partner relating to tennis would be the brick wall. You can hit the tennis ball, and it kind of bounces back to you enough so that you can hit it again, but it’s just not as fun as having another tennis player there. Probably a little conversationally boring, but you can keep it going. The third type of conversation partner, which is the worst, and  — and which I feel like our narrator runs into so many of these in the book — is the mattress. When you’re playing tennis and you can only bounce it up against a mattress. And what’s the ball do? It drops straight down, and you don’t get it back. And you are left hanging. We’ve all met those people at parties, the people that you’re like “Okay, how do I get out of this?” So I remembered that analogy as I was reading this book because I feel like she encounters all three of those types of people. 

KIM: She absolutely does. That is perfect, and I really, seriously think that could be a book. I love that idea: “How not to be a mattress.” So, our narrator is married and has two children: a son, Robin, and a daughter, Vicki. What sort of commentary do we think Delafield may be making on married, domestic life and motherhood?

AMY: What I got from it is that, by and large, it’s a thankless existence! I will say, I did identify with the narrator’s tendencies in motherhood at certain points. First of all, she says at one point, “Remember when before I had children, all of the things that I said I wasn't going to do: I wasn't going to lecture, I wasn't going to say, ‘Don’t’ all the time.” And then she makes a remark about just how often she does that now on a daily basis. Everybody thinks before they have kids that they’re going to be a certain way, and it all changes once you’re actually in it. But I also identify her tendency to downplay her pride in her kids. Now, I am extremely proud of my two kids, but I find myself doing that from time to time. At the very beginning of the book, for example, she has taken her son, Robin, back to boarding school and she’s at the hotel, and she writes:

I sit with several other mothers and we all talk about our boys in tones of disparagement, and about one another’s boys with great enthusiasm. 

I think you do that! You’re trying to downplay your own kid, but then you talk up everybody else’s kids. Later, after her daughter’s birthday party, she writes similarly:

Vicky looks nice on pony, and I receive compliments about her, which I accept in an off-hand manner, tinged with incredulity, in order to show that I am a modern mother and should scorn to be foolish about my children.

I do that all the time, also. When somebody compliments me about my kids, I try to always have a flip side: “Well, she burns her Pop Tarts and throws them in the garbage.” It reminded me that I probably shouldn’t do that as much as I do. I think there’s a happy medium. You don’t want to be like, “Yeah, of course she is! She’s amazing!” You know?

KIM: I’m still completely in the bragging phase, but she’s only 17 months, so give me time to get there. But on the point of her attitude toward marriage, children and the domestic life, it comes across as Sisyphean. Things never turn out the way she hopes. Never. It’s always constantly working, working, working, but on the other hand she never seems to lose her sense of humor and she never gives up. She says straight out that “a banking account, sound teeth, and adequate servants matter a great deal more than love,” and it does seem like she’s practical in that way. But she also has a bit of a romantic side that’s sweet. I think she looks for the best in Robert and she always tries to have a sense of humor through it all.

AMY: Yeah, so speaking of Robert, her husband in the book, what are your thoughts about him?

KIM: Wow. Talk about checked-out, insensitive, unromantic. Not necessarily the most supportive of spouses. I’ll read something to give our listeners an indication of him:

  December 10th.–Robert, this morning, complains of insufficient breakfast. Cannot feel that porridge, scrambled eggs, toast, marmalade, scones, brown bread, and coffee give adequate grounds for this, but admit that porridge is slightly burnt. How impossible ever to encounter burnt porridge without vivid recollections of Jane Eyre at Lowood School, say I parenthetically! This literary allusion not a success. Robert suggests ringing for Cook, and have greatest difficulty in persuading him that this course utterly disastrous.

He never appreciates her literary allusions, ever, and he rarely has anything to say unless it’s a complaint of some sort.

AMY: Yeah, he’s almost a doorstop. It’s almost like he’s not a person, he’s just like a blob sitting there that she’s always looking at like, “Seriously?” I love that she is able to roll her eyes at him, telling us what she really thinks a little bit about him.

KIM: Yeah, that and that she gets her way eventually in her own way, too, which you’ve got to say, “go for it.” 

AMY: Now, given that this book is said to be loosely autobiographical, you’ve got to wonder what Delafield’s husband thought of this caricature of a husband. It’s said that her relatives thought of her husband, Paul, as a sort of “clodhopper” sort of man, similar to the guy in this book, I think. I don’t know if she felt that way about him or not.

KIM: It’s not exactly the most flattering portrayal of him if it is based on him, I’ll say that. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s true.

KIM: So one of my favorite parts of the book was when Lady B invites people to this party and it “throws the entire neighborhood into consternation” when they hear it is to be a “fancy dress” party, fancy dress meaning costumes. Our narrator has already planned to wear a black taffeta dress, but Mademoiselle says that it can easily be transformed into a Dresden China shepherdess. When that idea is rejected she gets wilder and wilder, suggesting Mary Queen of Scots, or Madame du Pompadour, or even Cleopatra somehow. But the narrator goes ahead and wears her black taffeta, has a basically terrible time at this party, and then before bed is writing in her diary about how at the end of a party she doesn’t look nearly as nice as as she did at the beginning, and her husband says, “Hey, come to bed, what you’re doing is kind of a waste of time.” And she does wonder, “Is he right?”

AMY: About writing all her thoughts down… once again Robert’s just a dud.

KIM:  Yes, absolutely. Yeah, thanks Robert.

AMY: In another example where he’s a dud, which is one of my favorite parts of the book, there’s a moment where she’s having a really bad day. All these financial woes come to the forefront, and despite her money problems, she decides she needs a little retail therapy. She’s going to go buy a new hat because there ain’t nothing a new hat can’t fix, that’s her theory. As she’s trying on the hats, she’s frustrated because her hair looks awful, so from there she thinks, “I think I need to go get my hair done.” So she goes to get her hair done. While she’s at the beauty parlor, the hairdresser suggests that maybe she needs to consider dying her hair a different color. And because she’s kind of like us, Kim, in that she can’t say no sometimes when people are making suggestions like that… she’s such a people pleaser, and so she just says, “Okay, go ahead.” And she hates it. It’s just awful. Her friend Mary comes over later after the hideous hair disaster and she writes: 

Worst fears realised, as to hair. Dear Mary, always so observant, gazes at it in nerve-shattering silence but says nothing, till I am driven to make half-hearted explanation. Her only comment is that she cannot imagine why anybody should deliberately make themselves look ten years older than they need. Feel that, if she wishes to discourage further experiments on my part, this observation could scarcely be improved upon.

KIM: Ouch. Worst fears of a hairdo realized.

AMY: And throughout the rest of the book, people keep commenting on her hair color in pretty critical ways. It’s totally inappropriate. Who doesn’t have that insecurity as a woman, right?

KIM: And the dream or the fantasy that you’re going to get the haircut that’s going to change your life.

AMY: Which also, by the way, ties into a plotline in “Fleabag,” where they have to go get the haircut rectified. Her sister gets an awful cut and the main character just storms back into the salon and gives him hell. You’ve got to watch it.

KIM: We all need somebody to do that for us. So this trip to France seems like this one really important moment in the book. She finally has this chance to get away from all of these obligations bringing her down and experience the life that she might have had if she hadn’t opted to tie herself down. But when she gets there she has a comical “near-death” experience trying to swim more than she’s actually capable of. And she jokingly writes “I hope that Robert’s second wife will be kind to the children”. 

AMY: [laughing] She’s fine. She doesn’t drown, she’s just a little embarrassed by the end of it, but it seems to remind her, this episode, that she was never going to be cut out for this sort of free, sophisticated life that she dreams of. So she goes back to her life. She even brings back a souvenir, this blue dress that she buys in the south of France and thinks looks so amazing on her, and when she gets back to Devon she puts it on and realizes it looks awful on her. So it’s sort of symbolic that the grass is not necessarily greener wherever you go. The interesting thing is, she never explicitly complains about her life at all. She accepts it all with a wry and sardonic wit, that “that’s the way it is, and I’m going to make the best of it.”

KIM: I guess that’s very British.

AMY: Yeah, for sure, stiff upper lip. Stiff upper lip, but a kind of snide underbelly.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: So after this first diary, the success was so huge, both in England and America that she went on to write three sequels: The Provincial Lady Goes Further, The Provincial Lady in America, and The Provincial Lady in Wartime. So I’m interested in checking out a few more of these to see what becomes of her and Robert and the children. So sadly, for us, this book has never been adapted into a film or TV show or miniseries or anything like that. I wish it would be.

KIM: It should be, and you know what, I think you should cast this because I think you will have some good ideas for who we should cast.

AMY: Okay, so I think i’m just going to stick with the narrator and maybe Robert. For our narrator, while Iwas reading the book, the tone that she has so much reminds me of the mother from the Masterpiece series, “The Durrells.” She has that same exact politeness but sarcasm. So I could see the actress from “The Durrells,” Keeley Hawes, in this role, no problem, and that’s who I envisioned as I was reading the book. At the same time, I keep mentioning “Fleabag,” and Phoebe Waller-Bridge has the snarkiness, those little asides and everything, down pat. She would be perfect. When I was looking at old photos of Delafield, I think they bear an uncanny resemblance to one another as well, so I think that could work. 

KIM: You are right on there, I mean I haven't seen “Fleabag,” as we said, but it’s a cultural touchstone, so of course I’ve seen clips, and I know what she looks like and I think you’re exactly right. I can completely imagine that. Oh, they need to do this! It needs to happen.

AMY: They do! Yes. And if I was casting Robert, I would get a complete unknown because I don't think you want to distract by having Robert be any name or any familiar face. He’s such a …

KIM: He’s a dud, let’s face it. 

AMY: He’s a dud.

KIM: It can’t be our usual stable of British actors.

AMY: Yeah. Exactly. It just needs to be somebody’s random dad that they bring in, and don’t give him very many lines.

KIM: So what did we learn today from Diary of a Provincial Lady? We learned that having domestic help can be overrated.

AMY: We learned that a visit to a hair salon doesn’t always make a bad day better.

KIM: We learned that the essential skill for surviving motherhood is a sense of humor. 

AMY: We learned that in conversation, you never want to be a mattress.

Kim: And we learned that snooping at a fictional diary can be as gratifying as snooping through a real one! That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

KIM: Got ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know.

AMY: Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.