E. M. Delafield was a British author. She is best known for her largely autobiographical "Diary of a Provincial Lady".
Background
E. M. Delafield (Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, maiden name: la Pasture) was born on June 9, 1890 in Steyning, West Sussex, United Kingdom. Daughter of Count Henri Philip Ducarel de la Pasture and Elizabeth Lydia Rosabelle, daughter of Edward William Bonham, who as Mrs Henry de la Pasture was also a well-known novelist. She had a sister Yoe. After Count Henry died, her mother married Sir Hugh Clifford GCMG, who governed the colonies of the Gold Coast (1912–1919), Nigeria (1919–1925), Ceylon (1925–1927) and the Malay States.
Career
At the outbreak of World War I, she worked as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment in Exeter. Delafield's first novel Zella Sees Herself was published in 1917. At the end of the war she worked for the South-West Region of the Ministry of National Service in Bristol, and published two more novels. She continued to publish one or two novels every year until nearly the end of her life in 1943. At the initial meeting of the Kentisbeare Women's Institute, Delafield was unanimously elected president, and remained so until she died. Delafield died on 2 December 1943 after a progressive decline which first necessitated a colostomy and visits to a neurologist.
Achievements
Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, better known under her pseudonym E.M. Delafield, was a highly prolific fiction writer who achieved her greatest success with her Provincial Lady, a character whose popularity earned her a large following in both England and America.
In 1911, Delafield was accepted as a postulant by a French religious order established in Belgium.
Connections
On 17 July 1919, E. Delafield married Colonel Arthur Paul Dashwood, OBE, an engineer who had built the massive docks at Hong Kong Harbour. After two years in the Malay States, Delafield insisted on coming back to England and they lived in Croyle, an old house in Kentisbeare, Devon, on the Bradfield estate where he became the land agent. She had two children, Lionel Paul Dashwood and Rosamund Margaret Truelove.
