E. M. Delafield: Zella Sees Herself

It was only last autumn, towards the end of my penultimate semester of university, that I suddenly realised that I could use the library's free inter-library loan to hunt down all of the E. M. Delafield novels that can't be found in my library system -- which is most of them, as despite a lovely regional network of libraries that stretches from Nevada to the depths of Southern California, we only have a very few titles which aren't modern reprints. Aside from her justly beloved Provincial Lady books, Delafield wrote 25 other novels, plus 3 volumes of short stories and at least one play. I have made it my quest to finish all of her out of print work before I lose library access (which fortunately doesn't happen until the end of August), and have been happily reading my way through the novels chronologically, skipping the ones which are in print or otherwise locally available with the intention of going back to them later, after my ILL access ends.

Most of Delafield's early novels are studies in egotism; she's fascinated with the generation of egotistical authority figures who came of age in the 1890s and raised the children who suffered during WWI. Her novels study both how such tyrannically selfish adults came to exist, and the ways in which their absolute confidence in their own (usually mistaken) judgement leads them to create traumatised children who often replicate the damage in their own post-war families. Because of this, I find a lot of her novels uncomfortable to read; I like neither being inside the head of an egotist as they destroy others, nor being inside the head of an indvidual whose sense of identity is being hammered at, and Delafield excels at doing both.

Her first novel, published in 1917, is Zella Sees Herself. Along with the egotism strands, it also touches on another of her themes; the way in which girls raised by late Victorian & Edwardian standards end up unable to find happiness as adults. Zella is in a particularly bad way; when her mother dies she finds herself pulled between her conventionally sentimental aunt, who insists that Zella must display an appropriate set of reactions, and her authentically emotional father who bursts into rage at any sign of insincerity. Zella, already dreamy and given to dramatising her experience rather than simply feeling it, ends up unable to tell the difference between her true emotions and the sentiments she's expected to perform due to her class and gender. She makes bad decision after bad decision, basing her choices on brief emotional surges which she takes for the reality of her heart, and only narrowly avoids a number of personal catastrophes. She's contrasted with a number of characters; her father's devoutly Catholic French relatives, students at a convent school, a painfully affected young Spiritualist, and most directly with her cousin Muriel (who has internalised the conventions of her sentimental mother to the point that she has no thoughts of her own), and her intellectually ruthless cousin James, the only person in her life willing to speak the truth. It's an engaging book, but a painful one, because Zella's struggles are simultaneously so heartbreaking and so infuriating; I wanted to shake her and console her in equal measure. The ending leaves quite a bit of room for hope, which made me grateful; I think the book would have been too unpleasant otherwise.