The Provincial Lady in Wartime

The Provincial Lady in Wartime is a largely autobiographical novel by English author E. M. Delafield. It takes the form of a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman in the 1930s.

This is the fourth and last of Delafield’s autobiographical novel series, resumed at the insistence of Harold Macmillan. The Lady gets a flat in Buckingham Street (above the offices of her agent AD Peters) and works in the Air Raid Precautions HQ under the Adelphi building.

Delafield became a director of Time and Tide, a British weekly political and literary review magazine. When the editor 'wanted some light "middles", preferably in serial form, she promised to think of something to submit'. It was thus, in 1930, that her most popular and enduring work Diary of a Provincial Lady was written. Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930) inspired several sequels which chronicled later portions of her life: The Provincial Lady Goes Further (1932), The Provincial Lady in America (1934), and The Provincial Lady in Wartime (1940).

The Provincial Lady in Wartime was first published in 1940. E-book: ePUB, 63,800 words, average reading time 5 hours, 20 min.