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• Really enjoyed this book,I laughed out loud at some of her thoughts and observations! Lovely to read she had her own bank account and continously over drawn and making regular trips to the pawnbroker to please the bank manager! The amount of time spent away from her husband was quite surprising including her trip to America on her own,very liberating for the time. Will have to read more of her books now.

  4.00 out of 5

  shirley8

• I've had this book for so long that I can't remember when I first bought it and read it. Suffice it to say, since then I've read it countless times and never failed to laugh out loud. It's the ideal cure for the blues.

  4.00 out of 5

  Welshwoman

• In total contrast to Black Man, read EM Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady on the train today. Written in 1930, the Diary is written by an upper-middle class English woman living in Devon, where she has the requisite household of husband, son at boarding school, younger daughter still at home, and a small staff of Governess (the very French Mademoiselle), Cook, and housemaid. As befits a woman of her time, she does not work, but runs the household and engages in suitable activities, such as the Woman's Institute and the local church.At least partly autobiographical, it's caustically written, and for the time, fairly subversive, as the Provincial Lady chafes against the limitations of her station and pours out her inner worries and disquieting thoughts about her world to her diary. It's very much written in the same style as Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm or Nacncy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, from roughly the same time period, and while not as absurd or surreal as that book, it's still very very funny, with a particularly dry sense of humour prevailing throughout. This is the spiritual ancestor to Bridget Jones' Diary, in more ways than one, but the Provincial Lady would have found that book quite shocking.As well as being funny though, it's also a fascinating glimpse into the period between the wars in what would these days be called 'Middle England' - that very traditional hard-core of non-urban English life that was central to people's idea of what England was.Not going to be to everyone's taste, but a great little book that had me chuckling contentedly to myself on the train.

  4.00 out of 5

  MikeFarquhar

• This is an omnibus edition comprisingThe Diary of a Provincial Ladyand its 3 sequels which deal with her advenures in London ,America. and the early part of the second world war the "phoney war".Especially annoying in a library book that I had ordered and therefore could only retain for a limited time was the introduction's reccomendation not to read them back to back. It is gently amusing move up the social ladder from last months period piece. depicting a left leaning feminist of the time as she does her best to move through the social minefields.

  out of 5

  SimonW11

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