I still feel somewhat sheepish 😅 for proposing this, as I ended up loathing it. But I came to it having read and enjoyed quite a few Delafield books, and an entire non-fiction book about the case (Laura Thompson's Rex v. Edith Thompson -- which also wasn’t great) so it's been interesting to read the responses of those of you with different starting points, though we all seem to be converging on a verdict of dislike.
@FuzzyCaoraDhubh In my experience, EMD novels are of two distinct types. She is by far most known for the Provincial Lady series, which began as a Bridget Jones-level hit column: satirical diaries of an upper middle class woman juggling freelance writing, kids, running a house, overbearing neighbours, pompous bore of a husband. Little plot, much wry comedy of manners. But many of her other novels are women's tragedies, in which the main drivers are the failures of Victorian education/values for her generation, and terrible relationships Overbearing yet misguided mother/figures, uncongenial siblings/friends, and stultifying husbands (much older in spirit if not in age) are signatures -- all present in Messalina, but also in Provincial Lady, though given a lighter spin.
Buffeted by all these forces, her protagonists tend to be passive, alienated (including from themselves) and so socially awkward that these days I think would be read as ND representation. It was striking to me how much of a Messalina Elsie wasn’t. Even her ‘sexual magnetism’ was outwith her control, like that recurring description of the ‘Japanese doll look’ that she herself would be surprised by in the mirror. Men trying to pick her up at random, not necessarily when she’d particularly set out to attract, etc. I was struggling to see why EMD would change what seemed to be the most unusual details of the Thompson/Bywaters case, those decisive in T’s conviction (her being 8 years B’s senior, potentially financially independent of her husband, the quantity and content of her letters to B) to write such a conventional story, but evidently the didactic victim-of-society/circumstance tragedy was what she decided to make of it (or what her dedicatee ‘Rose’ asked for).
I’ve sometimes found EMD’s other tragedies overly determined too, but always thought her writing at the sentence/paragraph level very good and often quotable -- until Messalina. @BookEngine 's suggestion that it might have been dashed off rings true, and she did have a lot going on in 1923 (relocated back to the UK from Malaya, one young child and possibly pregnant with a second, new editorship of Time and Tide, responsibility as primary breadwinner following husband’s departure from the army…) but then again she was so prolific, some stinkers among the novels were probably to be expected. All the other EMDs I’ve read have been set in her own upper middle class milieu, so perhaps that also accounts for the thinness and conventional griminess of Messalina’s world.
Despite the (loooong) moan, I would still recommend reading Consequences as an interesting mirror to Messalina — the writing’s far superior, it’s semi-autobiographical, typical of EMD’s tragedies, and out of copyright, so free here.