SOURCE: "Perspectives," in E. M. Delafield, Twayne Publishers, 1985, pp. 115-29.

In the following excerpt, McCullen examines the Victorian influences, feminist viewpoint, and comic strategy evident in Delafield's works.

Ladies and Gentlemen in Victorian Fiction ironically enough kept [E.M.] Delafield's name alive in academic circles all the while her fiction was dropping out of print. Its title defines her subject: the "social moralities" of the Victorian upper-middle-class as these were chronicled by a number of minor women writers like Rhoda Broughton, Elizabeth Jewell, and her beloved Charlotte Mary Yonge. These minor Victorians never ceased to give her pleasure. From the beginning to the end of her life, her one hobby of record was reading, and she had literally grown up on the English, American, and French romances which so colored her thinking. She wrote about them, corresponded and traded books with other addicts, and studied them in a...