The Provinical Lady in America

Is there anything better than a book in the bath on a cold winter's night? (Wait... don't answer that.)

Anyway. Since Helen Fielding appears to have closed up shop, with no more installments of Bridget Jones's Diary in newspapers or bookstores, I've returned to her literary predecessor. The Provincial Lady is an English wife and mother who has a sideline career as a writer. She is the creation of E.M. Delafield, a pseudonym used by Elizabeth Monica Dashwood. The diaries are a thinly veiled account of the author's life, and balance out Delafield's more serious autobiographical novels such as Consequences.

The Provincial Lady's adventures take place between the two World Wars and are written in first-person form using much the same comic shorthand and self-deprecating humor later adopted by Fielding for her wildly funny and popular heroine. In the volume I just finished, The Provincial Lady in America (1934), the narrator is sent across the pond to promote her newest work. She neatly summarizes my city in a few lines:

Chicago strikes me as full of beautiful buildings and cannot imagine why nobody ever says anything about this aspect of it. Do not like to ask anything about gangsters, and see no signs of their activities, but hope these may be revealed later, otherwise children will be seriously disappointed.

A page or so later she writes:

Am beginning to feel slightly dazed--cocktails have undoubtedly contributed to this--but gratified beyond description at so much attention and kindness, and have hazy idea of writing letter home to explain that I am evidently of much greater importance than any of us has ever realized.

Doesn't that sound just like Bridget's signature line about being "v. busy and important"?