E. M. Delafield

Born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture in Sussex on June 9, 1890, E. M. Delafield became one of the most popular English writers of the 1920s and 1930s. She wrote widely across novels, short stories, essays, and plays, and she published under the name by which she is now remembered.

She is best known for Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), a largely autobiographical comic novel about an upper-middle-class woman managing family life in a Devon village. The book's dry humor and honest view of domestic life made it a lasting success, and Delafield is still admired for how gracefully she mixed light comedy with real feeling.

Delafield married Arthur Paul Dashwood in 1919 and had two children. Beyond her fiction, she was an active journalist and public figure, with a career broad enough that readers today often discover there was much more to her than the famous Provincial Lady books.