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Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (9 June 1890 – 2 December 1943), commonly known as E. M. Delafield, was a prolific English author. She wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays, but is now best known for her largely autobiographical Diary of a Provincial Lady, the fictional journal of an upper-middle-class Englishwoman in a Devon village in the 1930s. Delafield is considered a master of the comedy of manners.
Life
Delafield was born in Hove, Sussex. She was the elder daughter of Count Henry Philip Ducarel de la Pasture, of Llandogo Priory, Monmouthshire, and Elizabeth Lydia Rosabelle Bonham, daughter of Edward William Bonham, who as Mrs Henry de la Pasture was also a well-known novelist. The pen-name Delafield adopted later was a thin disguise of "de la Pasture," suggested by her sister, Yoé. The de la Pasture family was bilingual, and young Elizabeth was educated until age ten by a series of French governesses. She then attended several convent schools until 1907, when she was seventeen. Count Henry died suddenly of a heart attack the next year, when Delafield was entering the marriage market. She was lively and charming but shy, so she “failed” as a debutante. Her mother, meanwhile, found another husband for herself: Sir Hugh Clifford GCMG, who governed the colonies of the Gold Coast (1912–19), Nigeria (1919–25), Ceylon (1925–27), and the Malay States. Sir Hugh is said to have been the inspiration for a character in Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
In 1911, Delafield chose to pursue a religious life. She was accepted as a postulant by a French religious order established in Belgium. Her account of the experience, The Brides of Heaven, was written in 1931 and eventually published in her biography. "The motives which led me, as soon as I was 21, to enter a French Religious Order are worthy of little discussion, and less respect," she begins. These motives appear to have included receiving only one marriage offer as a debutante. She recounts being told by the Superior that if a doctor advised a surgical operation, "your Superiors will decide whether your life is of sufficient value to the community to justify the expense. If it is not, you will either get better without the operation or die. In either case you will be doing the will of God, and nothing else matters.” Delafield finally left the convent when she learned that Yoé was planning to join another enclosed order: "The thought of the utter and complete earthly separation that must necessarily take place between us was more than I could bear.”
