Housewife

Press, Volume C, Issue 29506, 6 May 1961, Page 3

Housewife

Provincial Daughter. By R. M. Dashwood. Chatto and Windus. 196 pp. To “the older woman” (as fashion advertisers so tactfully put it) this evocation of the spirit of E. M. Delafield will be a nostalgic experience. E.M.D.’s daughter, in a charming foreword, pleads that if she is charged with plagiarism the original Provincial Lady would readily forgive her temerity. So do we, for this saga of housewifely adventures is in the happiest of family traditions, though the frequent capitals which are used for the purposes of stress, and which were provocative enough in the ’twenties and ’thirties, are now alas, somewhat dated. This criticism apart, Miss Dashwood has not only inherited much of her mother’s wit, but possesses a refreshing one of her own. Her "diary” covers three months in the lives of a young and happy middle-class family living in the Home Counties. Lee is a doctor on a research job; there are three small sons with the restless and destructive instincts of their age, which are so much more amusing to read about than to encounter. The author's reflections on her unsatisfactory tendency to fat; her reactions to the wellmeant suggestions of friends that she could dress better, or alternatively that she should "use her brains” to intellectual purpose; the coldly logical minds of husbands and the elation when a literary effort is accepted and a broadcast envisaged, together with the chronic struggle to make ends meet are all in the "Provincial Lady” tradition. Greta, the German “help” —engaged au pair—is however a new element and is deliciously funny, the more so for not being overdrawn. Her despair, and anguished exclamation “What is?” when one of Toby’s toy soldiers (cunningly taking cover from an imaginary enemy in the oven) melts in a ferocious cloud of smoke, and her alternate moods of Wagnerian ectasy and Nietzchian gloom will be recognised at once as being true to type. A new generation which has never heard of “ErM.D.” should kindle sympathetically to the trials, so divertingly conveyed of the British housewife in our day and age.