When my life becomes boring, I read memoirs of other peoples' lives. E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady (published in 1930) purports to be the diary of a British housewife's humdrum life. In reality, E.M. Delafield is a highly educated lady of the British upper class whose life compared to mine seems far from humdrum. I enjoy her entertaining satires of family life, village characters, and in a subsequent diary, London literary and fashionable society. Her accounts of scraping by with not enough new evening gowns for dinner parties and her constant overdrafts at the bank, of unruly children, ill-behaved pets and a monosyllabic husband tucked behind the Times amuse me, but I also note with astonishment that though she worries constantly about money, she employs several housemaids, a cook, a gardener, a French nanny and sends her son to boarding school.
In her second diary, The Provincial Lady Goes Further, the family takes a vacation in France. As a matter of course, they bring along their son's tutor. When they return to England, the provincial lady rents a London flat. There she leads a life filled with literary luncheons and nightly cocktail parties as opposed to her quiet life in the country. I am fascinated with all these details of her privileged lifestyle, much of it having to do with keeping up appearances, the servant problem and the weight of familial and societal obligations.
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