Provincial Daughter

Written by EM Delafield's daughter, this is very much an homage to the Provincial Lady novels. It's slightly forced at the beginning, but once Dashwood finds her (unnamed) character's voice this rattles along at a pace and provides a few laugh-out-loud vignettes - particularly with regard to our heroine's relationship with her provinicial doctor husband. The recently published "Can Any Mother Help Me?", a collection of letters by pre- and post-war housewives from the Mass Observation archive, shows how true to life this novel is. Recommended for anyone who loved the original novels.

This book was simply charming, funny and clever and I loved it. It's a diary of a wife of a doctor and a mother of three boys in the fifties, but the problems and situations we can see in this book are eerily similar to what we can experience in our own houses nowadays. I read this book with great pleasure and I recommend it to everybody, who likes laughing.

From my blog: https://dominikasreadingchallenge.blogspot.com/2019/07/provincial-daughter-by-r-...

E M Delafield's daughter tries to fill her mother's shoes. Unwisely, she does not attempt to forge a writing identity of her own, but simply copycats her mother, merely highlighting the fact that nothing much happens to her, and that the average blogger could have made it more entertaining. (Nothing much ever happened to her mum, either, but if fandom had been around in the 30s, E M Delafield would've been a BNF, for sure. Her daughter … wouldn't.)

This is a book written in diary form by an aspiring writer who has ended up as a housewife and mother trying to make ends meet in 1950s England. It is quite humourous in parts a light read.