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240p PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 0953478076
PREFACE BY GREGORY LESTAGE
For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes's 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...'
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'Coupons', 1941, shows women's clothes
against a repeat of '66', the number of clothes coupons
allowed a year during the war, with the number needed
per item. |
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