It's Bridget Jones grown up, written even before Bridget's mother was born.

When the journal Time and Tide asked “E.M. Delafield” to contribute a serial, The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930) - now reissued in a series of beautifully designed books marking the publisher Virago's 30th anniversary - was the result. At the time, living quietly in Devon with her husband and two children - though she was also a magistrate and a pillar of the Women's Institute - Delafield (above) had nothing to write about. Except her own life, which is what she did.

The Provincial Lady of the title suffers from the foibles of her servants, but otherwise her problems are familiar. She has strained finances that give her headaches, neighbours with whom she must keep up, and a husband who falls asleep over The Times.

But before her immortal incarnation as the Provincial Lady, Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (1890-1943) was the daughter of a count and a novelist, and stepdaughter of an eminent colonial governor. She was a debutante in 1909, and a postulant in a French religious order in 1911.

During the First World War she worked as a nurse. In 1919 she married Colonel Arthur Paul Dashwood, the engineer who built the dock in Hong Kong Harbour, and she wrote more than 20 novels.

It was E.M. Delafield's deprecating turn of phrase that turned the inauspicious ordinariness of her diary into a star turn. The Diary of a Provincial Lady has never been out of print. It was followed by The Provincial Lady Goes Further (1932), The Provincial Lady in America (1934) and The Provincial Lady in Wartime (1940).

The Provincial Lady tries so hard, and invariably fails. Her children don't care and her husband ignores her aspirations. Move over Slummy Mummy. The Provincial Lady is the Grand-Mummy of them all.

The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield
Virago, £9.99

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy