Indexing E. M. Delafield’s <i>Diary of a Provincial Lady</i>

The sequence of novels featuring the Provincial Lady by the British author E. M. Delafield were bestsellers around the world on first publication between 1930 and 1940, and have never been out of print. Although fictional, they are a rich historical source for the interwar period. This article explains the background and context to the books, and describes the challenging process of indexing them, combining two tricky genres – fiction and diaries. The index is available at https://emdelafield.org/index-to-the-diary-of-a-provincial-lady .