Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield

It took me a bit of time to get into the style and pace of this book, but once I did I really liked it. It's clearly a bit of a pastiche of Diary of a Nobody, which I hated, but much more relatable. The narrator is an upper-class (or upper-middle-class, hard to tell since she isn't much of a snob) wife trying to run her household of a husband, two children, and several uncooperative servants, and constantly getting into various tangled and awkward situations. I recently moved to a new flat, where nothing works, and the few things that do work have been breaking down at the rate of about one appliance per day, and this book really helped me laugh about it (rather than cry). It took some getting used to, but I would up really liking the narrator's gentle, self-deprecating and unwearied sense of humour. It's not the sort of book that makes me scream with laughter (not the Wodehouse type of humour), but it's just consistently amusing throughout. The narrator keeps adding little philosophical notes to herself based on the experiences she has just related, such as, after having said that something isn't what she meant at all, 'Should often be very, very sorry to explain exactly what it is I do mean, and am in fact conscious of deliberately avoiding self-analysis on many occasions. Do not propose, however, to go into this now or at any other time'. One of my favourite (and, to me, extremely relatable) parts was 'Death by drowning said to be preceded by mental panorama of entire past life. Distressing reflection which very nearly causes me to sink again. Even one recollection from my past, if injudiciously selected, disconcerts me in the extreme, and cannot at all contemplate entire series.'