- All our books
- Categories:
- Abroad
- Adultery
- America
- Architecture
- Biography
- Bloomsbury
- Childhood
- Cookery Books
- Country Life
- Diaries
- Education
- Family
- Fathers
- Gender and Race
- Grandmothers
- History
- House and Garden
- Humour
- Ireland
- London
- Love Story
- Men (books about)
- Men (books by)
- Mothers
- Poetry
- Politics
- Science Fiction
- Scotland
- Sex
- Shopping
- Short Stories
- Single Women
- Social Comedy
- Suffragettes
- Teenagers (books for)
- Thrillers
- Translations
- Victoriana
- Widows
- Woman and Home
- Women’s Place
- Working Women
- WWI
- WWII
- Young Love
- Audiobooks
- Book Tokens
- eBooks
- Notebook
- Persephone Classics
- The Persephone Bag
- Catalogue
Find a book

A Book a Month
We can send a book a month for six or twelve months - the perfect gift. More »
Order This Book

lithograph by Frank Newbould 1942
PREFACE BY GREGORY LESTAGE
240pp
ISBN 9780953478071
For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes's name was associated with The New Yorker, for which she wrote a regular ‘Letter from London’ (Persephone book no. 111, London War Notes), 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 and 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…'
Also available as a Persephone Classic, a Persephone Audiobook and a Persephone e-book.
Endpaper
‘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.
Read reviews about all Persephone books
Read blogs about all Persephone books
Categories: Ireland London Short Stories Social Comedy Woman and Home WWII