I took a day off with the goal of spending it in my underwear. But Klara decided not to go to camp, and as a result I cooked, cleaned and did the laundry while she spent the day in her underwear.
Day: May 30, 2024
The Guilty Verdict
Hey, did you hear? Trump was found guilty of the unnamed crime we are all wondering about.
Pure Coincidence
Book Notes: E.M. Delafield’s The Way We Are
The Way We Are was published 2 years before E.M. Delafield’s smash hit The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), and one can very clearly see how the writer’s mastery of her craft develops between the two novels.
The Way We Are starts from a setup that is identical to the one we see in the later novel. There’s a provincial lady – Laura Temple – her nice but boring husband, two kids, three servants who keep quitting at the most inopportune time, fussy neighbors, silly activities at the Women’s Institute, and intractable flower bulbs. In The Way We Are, Delafield hadn’t yet found the winning strategy of narrating the life of her provincial heroine in the first person. It’s the charming inner voice of the main character that makes The Diary of a Provincial Lady so irresistible but The Way We Are is narrated in a clumsy third-person. To compensate for the shallowness of what a third-person narrative can transmit about a character like Laura, Delafield involves her in an incongruous and poorly written love affair that is completely absent from the later rewriting. The Dairy of the Provincial Lady is interesting without the added romantic complexities because the interest in the nobel resides in the narrative voice.
None of this means that The Way We Are is a bad novel. It’s less skilled than its successor but that’s normal in an author who grows and improves. Delafield’s novels are much more relatable for today’s women than any other author of the interwar or post-WWII era that I’ve read. This happens because Delafield’s characters are much wealthier than those of Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor and others. Today we don’t have servants, like Delafield’s provincial ladies did, but we have appliances that give us the same degree of freedom from domestic drudgery. If you are a 30+ married woman with children, there’s zero reason for you not to be reading Delafield.
In spite of being mega relatable, Delafield’s novels give a perfect glimpse into the life in the late 1920s in Great Britain. Plus, the author has a beautiful sense of humor. Oh, just go ahead and read the novel already. I promise you’ll have a good time.
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