SOURCE: "Sophisticated Ladies," in The School of Femininity: A Book for and about Women as They Are Interpreted through Feminine Writers of Yesterday and Today, 1936. Reprint by Kennikat Press, Inc., 1966, pp. 281-310.

In the following excerpt, Lawrence praises simplicity and humor in the Diary of a Provincial Lady.

E. M. Delafield has … self-sufficiency in her writing. In The Diary of a Provincial Lady she set the reading English world smiling about the funny slant of an ordinary woman's existence. She has written other stories which in their way are good pieces of experimental portraiture of women, but none of them has the ingenuous sparkle of the provincial lady's record of her affairs. She has no affairs. She has a husband who hides behind his newspapers when she wants to talk to him, and reaches for his hat when the question of more money for household expenses comes up...