Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (9 June 1890 – 2 December 1943), commonly known as E. M. Delafield, was a prolific English author.

She wrote novels, short stories, and plays, among other genres, but Delafield is best known for her largely autobiographical Diary of a Provincial Lady, which took the form of a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman living mostly in a Devon village of the 1930s.

In sequels, the Provincial Lady buys a flat in London, travels to America and attempts to find war-work during the Phoney War.

[3] The pen name Delafield she adopted later was a thin disguise on de la Pasture that her sister Yoé suggested.

[8] Their mother, on the other hand, quickly succeeded in finding another husband—Sir Hugh Clifford GCMG, who governed the colonies of the Gold Coast (1912–19), Nigeria (1919–25), Ceylon (1925–27) and the Malay States.

finally left when she learned that Yoé was planning to join another enclosed order: "the thought of the utter and complete earthly separation that must necessarily take place between us was more than I could bear.” At the outbreak of World War I, she worked as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment in Exeter, under the formidable command of Georgiana Buller (daughter of a general who held the Victoria Cross, and later a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire).

After two years in the Malay States, Delafield insisted on coming back to England and they lived in Croyle, an old house in Kentisbeare, Devon, on the Bradfield estate where Dashwood became the land agent.

[22] Delafield was a great admirer and champion of Charlotte M. Yonge[23] and an authority on the Brontë family about whom she wrote The Brontes, Their Lives Recorded by Their Contemporaries.

Three years later, on 2 December 1943, Delafield died after collapsing while lecturing in Oxford, She was buried under her favourite yew tree in Kentisbeare churchyard, near her son.

[26] She later said: “The idea had come into my mind of writing, in the first person singular, a perfectly straightforward account of the many disconcerting facets presented by everyday life to the average woman .

The Dictionary of National Biography says "On the outbreak of the Second World War, she lectured for the Ministry of Information and spent some weeks in France."

Delafield was a respected and highly prolific author of middlebrow fiction in her day, along with such writers as Angela Thirkel and Agatha Christie.

However, Delafield’s contributions to magazines, such as Time and Tide, and Punch (which published over 400 of her pieces) made her widely known and loved in the United Kingdom.

and they didn’t realize till now, when those articles have ceased, what a blank their absence would leave.”[35] Delafield’s novels were reasonably well received, but it was her humorous magazine contributions for which she was most appreciated and is best remembered.

The critic Henry Canby attributed her lack of “resounding” critical success to her unpretentiousness, saying she was “one, who, like Jane Austen, seems to write easily on her lap, while others talk and clamor about her.”[37] Faye Hamel has pointed out how “enormous skill, subtlety, and power of selection have gone to create this seemingly mild and commonplace character (the Provincial Lady).