Born in 1890 to Count Henry de la Pasture and his novelist wife, E.M. Delafield was brought up according to strict Late Victorian precepts; upon failing to ensnare a husband at a young age, she entered a convent in Belgium the moment she turned 21. Having recovered from this experience, she later became a VAD (voluntary nursing for the war effort) and wrote her first novel. Delafield began publishing her writing in her mid-twenties; the year her fourth novel, Consequences, was published, she married Paul Dashwood, a civil engineer turned land agent.The pair spent three years in Malaya, followed by a country life in rural Devon; many of Delafield's novels and short stories are semi-autobiographical or stem from her experiences living abroad and in the rural countryside. Delafield died in 1943.
