Mollie Panter-Downes
MOLLIE PANTER-DOWNES (1906-97) was brought up
by her mother in Sussex after her father, a Major
in the Royal Irish Regiment, was killed at Mons
in August 1914. She published her first novel,
The Shoreless Sea, when she was seventeen
- it was a bestseller. She wrote three more popular
novels as well as articles and short stories and
in 1929 married Clare Robinson, travelled round
the world, and moved to the sixteenth-century
house near Chiddingfold in Surrey where she and
her family lived for over sixty years. Each day
Mollie took a basket with her lunch to a writing
hut in the woods where, between 1938 and 1984,
she wrote 852 pieces for The New Yorker:
Letters from London, book reviews, Reporter at
Large and short stories, as well as non-fiction
books such as Ooty Preserved (1967).
In 1947 she published One Fine Day, one
of the century's most enduring novels. Persephone
has reprinted the short stories as Good
Evening, Mrs Craven and Minnie's
Room. |
