[In the following excerpt, Lawrence praises simplicity and humor in the Diary of a Provincial Lady.]

E. M. Delafield has … self-sufficiency in her writing. In The Diary of a Provincial Lady she set the reading English world smiling about the funny slant of an ordinary woman's existence. She has written other stories which in their way are good pieces of experimental portraiture of women, but none of them has the ingenuous sparkle of the provincial lady's record of her affairs. She has no affairs. She has a husband who hides behind his newspapers when she wants to talk to him, and reaches for his hat when the question of more money for household expenses comes up. He is a nice husband, and does take an interest in the things that go on in his home. He is nice, too, about allowing his wife to write in her spare time, but he is only a man, and a woman has to have some outlet for her thoughts other than a man. The book is significant for all its slightness because it is possibly the first time a woman ever set down the doings of her day-to-day life in all their simplicity, and attached to them her own tentatively philosophical conclusions.

The writing might appear at first glance to be the writing of a helpmeet. Certainly it is the writing of a woman painting the situation of a helpmeet woman. Living in honorable matrimony with a man, rearing his children, attending to his house. But the sophisticated element raises its signs in the fact that she thinks her own thoughts as she goes through her days, and also in the fact that these thoughts happen to be amusing thoughts. She is under no psychological strain about the unfair emotional relationship between men and women. She is under no need to worship her man. But she wants to be entertaining. She must be entertaining. So she in her limited circumstance makes a fine story out of the irritating visits of the rector's wife, and the daily struggle with inadequate help in her own house. It is all a great game to her. The husband is varyingly attentive to the entertainment she provides. He reads his papers. He gives a snort or a grunt as the case may be, and he sees fit to be amused or disgusted, but the show goes on whether he applauds or not. He sticks and that is the main thing. He pays the bills, which is another thing, and it is up, therefore, to any lady to make it all seem extraordinarily interesting. Which is exactly what she does, and while she does it, she draws a picture of the life of an average couple together after the tense emotion of romance has died down and the long business of pulling together in harness has engrossed them to the exclusion of almost every other consideration. It is more to the point that there is enough cream in the house for the tea than that a woman have power to rouse all manner of fine feeling around her. It is more important for a man to be able to pay the coal bills than to have power to drive a woman to distraction over the stray thoughts he may be thinking. The helpmeet woman would be concerned about the subsiding of the feeling. She would be digging and prodding into the reactions of the man—"Are you happy?" "Do I satisfy you?"—the sophisticate is practical. She takes it for granted that the man is happy, and she sees to it that she does her part to satisfy him. This is the example without par of the sophisticated lady handling the prevailing matrimonial situation in complete normality. It is a lady of the ingenue type, playing her simple part with all its funny nuances, easy on the emotions, easy on the mind, gentle yet lively, full of fun, yet full of technical appreciation of every least little movement there is to be taken with it.