Mollie Panter-Downes Books

Originally published in The New Yorker, Mollie Panter-Downes was the voice of England during the Second World War.

Contains ten stories describing aspects of British life in the years after the war.

For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes' name was associated with "The New Yorker", for which she wrote a regular 'Letter from London', book reviews and over thirty short stories; of the twenty-one in "Good Evening, Mrs Craven", written between 1939 and 1944, only two had ever been reprinted - these very English stories have, until now, been unavailable to English readers.Exploring most aspects of English domestic life during the war, they are about separation, sewing parties, fear, evacuees sent to the country, obsession with food, the social revolutions of wartime. In the Daily Mail Angela Huth called "Good Evening, Mrs Craven" 'my especial find' and Ruth Gorb in the "Ham & High" contrasted the humour of some of the stories with the desolation of others: 'The mistress, unlike the wife, has to worry and mourn in secret for her man; a middle-aged spinster finds herself alone again when the camaraderie of the air-raids is over ...'

Mollie Panter-Downes not only wrote short stories (Good Evening,Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories and Minnie’s Room: The Peacetime Stories) but also non-fiction ‘Letters from London’ for The New Yorker. She wrote her first one on September 3rd 1939; on May 12th 1945 she wrote her hundred and fifty-third. Her New Yorker obituary observed: ‘Other correspondents were writing about the war, of course, often with great power and conviction, but they dealt with large incidents and events, while Mollie wrote of the quotidian stream of English life, of what it was like to actually live in a war, of what the government was doing, of the nervous sound of the air-raid sirens, of the disappearance of the egg, of children being evacuated – of all the things that made life in England bearable and unbearable. In a steady flow of copy, directed to editors she had never met at a magazine she had never visited, she undoubtedly did more to explain wartime England to American readers than anyone else in the field.'

A hymn to England and a vanished way of life, a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war.

Published in 1931, Mollie Panter-Downes's book explores the different echelons of the increasingly self-conscious middle class and the ways in which the tensions and nuances of vocabulary, dress, occupation, politics, taste and, ultimately, the literary world contribute to the incompatibility of a marriage.