Zella Sees Herself by EM Delafield (1917)

The comparison I inevitably make in looking at this first novel of a daughter is with the incredibly capable works of her mother. It is almost like the two orchestrated their careers, one terminating with Michael Ferrys in May 1913, the other commencing in March 1917 with this book. Elizabeth de la Pasture remarried and went off to Africa to live a second life of colonial officialhood, and lived on until 1945. Her daughter Edmee streamed from strength to strength, culminating in the Provinical Lady series, but predeceased her mother in 1943. Ostensibly, this book inhabits the world of her mother's books - the comfortable Edwardian scene of country houses, smart London, the necessity of marriage, and a good quotient of social humour. There seems on this evidence no doubt that she has inherited her mother's storyteller-gene - the whole thing flows effortlessly and with great colour. It does not, in those respects, exercise the mind particularly, but it definitely entertains. But there are differences, and they speak to the coming of the modern. We begin with Zella (short for Gisele) de Kervoyou losing her mother at the age of fourteen, and showing at the same time many signs of typical youthful self-concern. She is borne down upon by her mother's sister Marianne, a woman whose unthinking, small-minded respectability and blathering conventionality must be a portrait from the life of so many withering aunts of the period. She is superbly realised. Marianne's horror can well be imagined when, some time later, Zella, in another fit of self-storytelling, decides she would like to go to a Roman Catholic convent for schooling, and ends up converting in a small maelstrom of fervency. Marianne's ultra-Englishness and protestantism is supremely affronted by all this French nonsense (Zella's father is French and, in Marianne's condescending eyes, terribly dear and dreadfully lax at one and the same time) - she sees her role as surrogate mother being undermined at all eventualities. But in amongst all this fine humour there are hints of what might be to come in this author's career. Zella is lightly psychoanalysed in a way which would never have occured to Elizabeth de la Pasture, and has uncertainties in her character, and tendencies toward the lightest of philosophical thought, which betray her as being the product of a later generation. The story culminates in the typical scene of a country house stay, where Zella, whose latest self-embroidering scheme is one of Romance with a very handsome, slightly empty, wealthy young man, gets a dose of truth and reality from her cousin James, Marianne's son, with whom she's always got on. He begs her to disentangle herself from her web of self-mystification and not marry someone who'll ultimately make her unhappy. This is perhaps the only point in the novel where I would say inexperience has caused a slight tremor - her inamorato's inappropriateness is not quite cleanly forced upon us, though it is possible to see what she was getting at. In its ending, with Zella having acceded to James' urging and rejected him, causing not only heartbreak but anger, and in floods of tears and some (undeserved) social disgrace as a flirt, mulling to herself the fact that she never seems quite able to connect with the real, in place of the fancied and over-elaborated fiction of self to which she's a votary, Delafield delves more deeply than her mother would have done, and soundly satisfies.