Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

I am always looking for a good Bedside Table Book (BTB), so I was pleased that my pretty box from Persephone Books included a collection of short stories, Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes.

These twenty-one stories were first published in The New Yorker between October 1939 and December 1944. Wartime on the domestic front, evacuees, food shortages, sewing partes and separation is depicted with mostly stoic good humor and a stiff upper lip. Or as Panter-Downes said of her wartime work, “If the pieces had value, it’s because I took note of the trivial, ordinary things that happened to ordinary people.”

There is nothing ordinary about Panter-Downes’ prose. The Independent described Good Evening, Mrs. Craven “as dazzlingly written… Mollie Panter-Downes is as profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker.”

Over a sixty-year period, Panter-Downes would write 852 pieces for The New Yorker well as non-fiction books and novels.