What a gem of a book, my friends. Exceptionally enjoyable, charming, and lovely. Some reviewers complain that nothing happens in this novel but it’s a diary of a provincial lady. What do they expect to happen? This is a book about life. Life is what happens. Normal, often clumsy, sometimes disappointing life.
I highly recommend reading Delafield’s excellent novel and then following it with Richard B Wright’s devastating remake, 70 years later, in Clara Callan.
Diary of a Provincial Lady is very funny and light-hearted but I did manage to find a disturbing subtext in it. Trust me to find disturbing subtexts in everything. The way the narrator feels in the 1930s will be extremely easy for many women to identify with today. The same endless unhappiness with her own appearance, the same terror of the word “age”, the same incapacity to end a boring conversation out of onerous politeness, the same tendency to wrap her relationship with her children in layers of guilt. Many of the provincial lady’s monologues I could be reading on Facebook today.
An excellent novel. A perfect summertime read.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m glad you enjoyed it! It’s one of my favorite books. And yes, it is sadly familiar . . . you’d think in 100 years we would have been able to make more progress. But the book also illustrates a trope that I think is common among writers, not just women writers: the struggle to get some words on paper when life seems to be conspiring against you, even though the book itself is evidence that the writing has happened.
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The detailed descriptions of daily life are particularly delightful. I love reading about daily life and pondering how many things have changed.
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” This is a book about life. Life is what happens. Normal, often clumsy, sometimes disappointing life.”
If you love such books, have you read The Stone Diaries Pulitzer Prize Winner by Carol Shields?
I was supposed to study this novel at the seminar of Canadian female literature, but haven’t read it then. Should I give it a try?
Amazon describes it as
I had less time then and didn’t have energy to read all books we were asked to.
In addition, I thought literature about housewives wasn’t likely to be interesting, relatable or illuminating (for me). Was I wrong?
Btw, we studied “The Handsmaid’s Tale” (wrote a paper on it) and “The Bell Jar” (read and thought the main character was simply mentally ill).
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Diary of a Provincial Lady is very, very funny. Do read, you’ll have a wonderful time.
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Didn’t care for this one, unfortunately (though I usually love your recommendations).
I was surprised to read in the author’s bio: “After the success of the first two volumes of the Provincial Lady in 1930 and 1932, Delafield, at the suggestion of her American publisher Cass Canfield, went to Russia to visit cities and live on a collective farm in 1936. The resulting book, Straw Without Bricks: I Visit the Soviets, was later reprinted as The Provincial Lady in Russia.”
I liked this line that I read in a review:
As evidence of how personality-destroying communism could be, one need only compare the humorous banter of the first Lady books to the plodding stream of words in this one.
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A good writer is not necessarily a good person, as we know only to well. That she went at all to gape at animals in the zoo and try to be cute about it is utterly unforgivable. I will not be reading the book and I lament she was such a low-quality human being that she would participate in this farce.
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