I really love the work of Mollie Panter-Downes. I've loved everything I've read by her from her first novel written at the age of 17, The Shoreless Sea, to her wonderfully evocative One Fine Day and now her short stories collected in Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes published by Persephone Books. Granted her first novel was very much a first novel, sweet and sentimental, her more mature One Fine Day is as good a novel as you'll find describing the mood of the middle class in post-war Britain.
The stories fall somewhere in between but certainly closer to her more sophisticated later work. Each story is a perfect slice of life in wartime Britain. Although the lives of the characters are ordinary, their circumstances are anything but, and Panter-Downes trains a keen eye on her subjects. It's hard not to be impressed that in so few pages an author can bring to life the petty squabbles, the disappointments great and small, the sadness and anguish and the tiny joys of people living through a terrible war, and she tells her stories with great sympathy yet always with dignity.
I've already written about the collection of stories here and here. Twenty-one stories are featured that originally appeared in the New Yorker between 1939-1944 and are presented in chronological order. She doesn't write about the battlefields, it's the average person that takes the forefront and all aspects of daily life are written about. I'm not going to try and summarize each individual story as they run the gamut of situations from the mundane--sewing parties, to the possibly life-altering--saying goodbye to a spouse off to fight a war who might not return.
My favorite story is one that also appeared in Wave Me Goodbye, an anthology of stories about the war written by women that I read last year and highly recommend. "Goodbye, My Love" is a poignant story of a woman preparing for the embarkation of her husband to the Middle East. They spend their last week visiting relatives and friends and sharing their last fleeting moments together. The woman's sadness is palpable as she tries to hold her emotions together even when her mother-in-law so insensitively tells her how good it is they've not had children--"After all you'll be perfectly free free won't you? It isn't as though you have any ties."
She finally sees her husband off. Emotionally she's in a near state of exhaustion but as with so many women in these stories knows she must simply press on, "After all, there are thousands of women going through what I'm going through and they don't make a fuss." In the end her husband calls to tell her his departure has been cancelled and he has another week. Instead of happiness she breaks down in tears--no doubt at the idea of enduring yet another week of counting down the days until he goes off to war.
This is a wonderful collection of stories, some better than others, but certainly an excellent addition to the war literature of the period.
"In a manner at once elegant and down-to-earth, Panter-Downes transmitted the anxiety and fear, but also the underlying British resolve, and even...some of the black humor."
This Persephone edition brings back into print stories that Panter-Downes sadly left to fade into obscurity. The collection also includes two of her "Letter from London", which also appeared in the New Yorker at the beginning and end of the war, as well as an excellent preface and afterword. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote exclusively for the New Yorker and she was better known to American audiences than British for this fact. Between 1938 and 1987 she published 857 pieces in the magazine ranging from poetry to short stories to book reviews to her weekly column. She considered herself a journalist first, which is perhaps why she never tried to preserve her short stories.
In the afterword the editor notes that the writer of Panter-downes obituary that appeared in The Guardian "divined that she was 'one of those writers who will, without doubt, be rediscovered'." I'm happy she's been redisovered and hope that more of her work will be brought back into print. At some point I hope to get my hands on the Persephone edition of Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. Maybe Santa will bring me a copy if I'm good?