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EM Delafield is best-known as the author of The Diary of a Provincial Lady(1930). But her favourite among her books was Consequences(1919), the deeply-felt novel she wrote about the plight of girls given no opportunities apart from marriage.
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Alex Clare is awkward and oversensitive and gets everything wrong; she refuses to marry the only young man who 'offers' and believes there is nothing left for her but to enter a convent. But that is not quite the end of her tragic story. Nor was it for EM Delafield, who also entered a convent for a year; but in her case she was able to find freedom through working as a VAD in an army hospital, 'which was emancipation of the most delirious kind. It was occupation, it was self-respect.'
Like Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, written at the same time, Consequencesis a scream of horror against Victorian values; however, its ironic tone cannot disguise EM Delafield's deeply compassionate and feminist stance.
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