books in order

Mollie Panter-Downes Books In Order

Novels

  1. My Husband Simon (1931)
  2. One Fine Day (1947)

Collections

  1. Ooty Preserved (1967)
  2. Good Evening, Mrs Craven (1999)
  3. Minnie’s Room (2002)

Non fiction

  1. At the Pines (1971)
  2. London War Notes (1971)

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Mollie Panter-Downes Books Overview

One Fine Day

It’s a summer’s day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria are forced to manage without ‘those anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and pulled the strings.’ Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. But alone on a hillside, as evening falls, Laura comes to see what it would have meant if the war had been lost, and looks to the future with a new hope and optimism. First published in 1947, this subtle, finely wrought novel presents a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war, its effect upon a marriage, and the gradual but significant change in the nature of English middle class life.

Good Evening, Mrs Craven

Boldly published, beautifully designed, dazzlingly written…
. Profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker. Felipe Fern ndez Armesto, The IndependentFor fifty years, Mollie Panter Downes name was associated with The New Yorker. She wrote a regular column Letter from London , book reviews, and over thirty short stories about English domestic life during World War Two. Twenty one of these stories are included in Good Evening Mrs Craven the first collected volume of her work. Mollie Panter Downes writes about those coping on the periphery of the war who attend sewing parties, host evacuees sent to the country, and obsess over food and rationing. She captures the quiet moments of fear and courage. Here we find the mistress, unlike the wife, who has to worry and mourn in secret for her man and a middle aged spinster finds herself alone again when the camaraderie of the air raids is over. Don t think I m being stupid and morbid, she said, but supposing anything happens…
. You might be wounded or ill and I wouldn t know. She tried to laugh. The War Office doesn t have a service for sending telegrams to mistresses, does it? Mollie Panter Downes 1906 1997 published her first novel, The Shoreless Sea, when she was seventeen, which became a bestseller. She wrote three more popular novels as well as articles, short stories, and the very popular column Letters from London for The New Yorker.

Minnie’s Room

This companion volume to Persephone Book No. 8, ‘Good Evening, Mrs Craven’, contains ten stories describing aspects of British life in the years after the war. ‘Minnie’s Room‘ itself is about a family who are unable to believe that their maid wants to leave them to live in a room of her own. An elderly couple emigrates because of ‘the dragon out to gobble their modest, honourable incomes.’ The sisters in ‘Beside the Still Waters’ grumble because ‘Everything is so terribly difficult nowadays.’Mollie Panter Downes, said the Spectator, ‘is discomfortingly good at anatomising the crudities and subtleties of snobbery but she is never unkind.’

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