[Gutenberg 34935] • Consequences
![[Gutenberg 34935] • Consequences](/cover/inPUON8ElXJL1VWz/big/[Gutenberg%2034935]%20%e2%80%a2%20Consequences.jpg)
- Authors
- Delafield, E.M.
- Publisher
- Persephone Books
- Tags
- london (england) -- social life and customs -- 19th century -- fiction , london (england) -- social life and customs -- 20th century -- fiction , loneliness -- fiction , aristocracy (social class) -- fiction , feminism , classics , alienation (social psychology) -- fiction , young women -- fiction
- ISBN
- 9781903155028
- Date
- 1917-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 0.26 MB
- Lang
- en
EM Delafield is best-known as the author of *The Diary of a Provincial Lady* (1930). But her favourite among her books was *Consequences* (1919), the deeply-felt novel she wrote about the plight of girls given no opportunities apart from marriage.
Alex Clare is awkward and oversensitive and gets everything wrong; she refuses to marry the only young man who ‘offers’ and believes there is nothing left for her but to enter a convent. But that is not quite the end of her tragic story. Nor was it for EM Delafield, who also entered a convent for a year; but in her case she was able to find freedom through working as a VAD in an army hospital, ‘which was emancipation of the most delirious kind. It was occupation, it was self-respect.’
Like Lytton Strachey’s *Eminent Victorians* , written at the same time, *Consequences* is a scream of horror against Victorian values; however, its ironic tone cannot disguise EM Delafield’s deeply compassionate and feminist stance.