[Canby was a professor of English at Yale University and one of the founders of the Saturday Review of Literature, where he served as editor in chief from 1924 to 1936. He was the author of many books, including The Short Story in English (1909), a history of that genre which was long considered the standard text for college students. In the following review, Canby favorably appraises the Further Diary of a Provincial Lady.]

Readers of the first Diary of a Provincial Lady will not be disappointed in this sequel. These apparently random and artless notes upon the difficulties in being literary in Devonshire with a family on your back, and upon the trials of playing up to a literary reputation amidst the professional sophistry of London, are not so artless and so random as they seem, although their informality is an excellent medium for the witty charm of the book. Miss Delafield has made a self-portrait here, and a family portrait, and a portrait of that strange assemblage which buzzes about a new literary reputation, which are indeed more evidence that she is one of the really skilful novelists of manners in our day. Why has she not had the resounding critical success which so many English women writers less excellent than she have grown great upon? Because, I think, of her unpretentiousness, the unpretentiousness of one who, like Jane Austen, seems to write easily upon her lap, while others talk and clamor about her. She is somewhat too ironic, too unsentimental, to get the reputation (which she deserves) of humorist, too delicate, too unpointed in her satire, to arouse fear or indignation, too much concerned with the humors of everyday manners as the best index of society, to interest the heavy-handed advocates of social changes. She illustrates the difficulties of belonging to the Jane Austen school in the nineteen thirties. Not that she is antiquarian, in spite of her delightful A Good Man's Love, which was a tragedy worked out in iced wedding cake, or imitative. She is of our age and no other; belongs to the genteel tradition of which she makes fun, while rather loving it; dips into the milieu of platinum blondes or Bloomsbury sexualists with a delight in new experience, not for an instant losing her head; is aware of all the new ideas and new moralities abroad without ceasing to love her own people who, by turns, make novelties incongruous, and are made incongruous by them. Indeed, if anyone writing fiction is better equipped for the business of comedy, I do not know her name.

I would not overstate the case of Miss Delafield. That would be to commit the precise error of which she is never guilty. She will never be a great novelist. She will never be a serious novelist in terms of that seriousness approved by those whose concern is with the class war, or the sex struggle, or the depicting of new and unlovely types thrown up by democracy. She is an aristocratic writer, which does not mean that she is in love with the aristocracy, but does imply a certain delight in the trials and errors of civilized living quite apart from concern as to its philosophy or sociology. I think that her circle of readers will widen and that those she gets she will keep.

As for the Further Diary of a Provincial Lady, here is a novel exposed in its making; plotless but with the characters all made and well made; themeless, unless the attempts of a lady writer to keep up with her reputation is a theme, but with the incident and personality for which, if the truth were told, we follow themes; informal yet constructed to catch the intellectual whimsies of Emma Hay, the naive sexualism of Parmela Pringle, the attractive stolidity of Robert, and also to express perfectly the business of being both mother and novelist, and the charm with irony which is Miss Delafield's especial forte.