The War-Workers by EM Delafield (1918)

 This is enormously different to her debut a year earlier. That was a standard novel, in a sense anyway, of a young girl of established means starting on the journey of adult life, albeit with a nice comic conceit of her self-storytelling giving it swing. This is a troupe-novel. The crew are the female clerical workers of the Midland Supply Depot in 1915-16. The Depot is run by Charmian 'Char' Vivian, a forceful high-up, the daughter of one of the local country-houses. The majority of the office staff are in awe of her, idolizing her huge attention to the work, and of course, true to the times, her social status. She has a free ride with them therefore, and the fact that some of her attitudes are much more to do with self-aggrandisement than belief in the importance of their work (despite her great protestations to the contrary), is one they miss in their adoration. The main purpose of the piece is comedy, though there are the obvious moral undertones. So we get the snotty and devoted secretary, the bumbling but loveable stats-keeper, the salt-of-the-earth general staffers locked in a tart mesh of status and posturing. The main part of the action aside from the office is set in the hostel over the street where they live. There, the slightly inefficient but delightful Irish superintendent tries to keep them all alive and rested under the phenomenal wallop of Char's regimen. The focus comes when an under-secretary is recruited to help snotty with her duties. Grace Jones is a young Welsh woman of great straightforwardness, and an ability to get on with most people despite her honesty. Char finds her skill and lack of nonsense irritating almost subconsciously - the sublimated knowledge of her less altruistic motivations playing in her quite freshly. Grace just gets on with it. The key comes when Char's father has a stroke, and she is drawn away from the Depot for a while. Grace is deputized to go out to Plessing, the family home, to keep up the work pace. But there she furthers her friendship with Lady Vivian, Char's mother, who sees very clearly what a gem she is, and respects her. The tension between daughter and mother is never very far from the surface - Lady Vivian is clear-sighted about her daughter's failings and not afraid to enumerate them. Grace keeps clear of this of course, but can't help confirming Lady Vivian's prejudices. Various contretemps play out, as Char's father experiences another stroke, and her unwillingness to leave her work at the Depot to be there for her father in his last days is revealed inadvertently to the staff back at the hostel. Though the bursting of this bubble is one of the main centres of the climax, and the much more realistic view of Char held by all the staff bar the snotty secretary is the result, in Delafield's hands it doesn't turn into a pantomime, and the resolution is realistically muted. Some staff resign, their delusions blasted, but they're still friends with those who remain. Lady Vivian's plan to turn Plessing into a convalescent home for badly wounded soldiers comes to pass with the help of a local doctor. They manage to keep it from Char's empire of control with some deft moves, and the hostel superintendent, who has been summarily dismissed by Char for no good reason, goes to work there independent of her arbitrary influence. The friendship between Lady Vivian and Grace has developed to such an extent that Grace also heads there to work, extricated from Char's dominion. But Char carries on with the Depot, and is still the centre of her own small world of orders, the same old work carrying on at the same cracking pace. The fact that this one has that muted denouement, where someone of great energy and effectiveness is nevertheless a very faulty character, and still contrastingly quite successful, and yet taken by those who know her well with an enormous grain of salt, gives it the edge of modernity. These nuances show that Delafield was wanting to embrace, I think, modern psychological tropes, whilst showing a lot of evidence of the traditional expected in her times. A very interesting balancing act.