Minnie’s Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

High Street Colchester 1950 by Charles Debenham

WITH A PUBLISHER'S NOTE
144pp
ISBN 9781903155240

This companion volume to Persephone book No. 8 Good Evening, Mrs Craven:The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes contains ten stories describing aspects of British life in the years after the war. 'Minnie's Room' itself is about a family who are unable to believe that their maid wants to leave them to live in a room of her own. An elderly couple emigrates because of 'the dragon out to gobble their modest, honourable incomes.' The sisters in 'Beside the Still Waters' grumble because: 'Everything is so terribly difficult nowadays.'

These 'acute, funny and poignant stories' (Daily Telegraph) reveal 'an unerring observer, with a stunning gift for economy of description' (The Times). Mollie Panter-Downes, said the Spectator, 'is discomfortingly good at anatomising the crudities and subtleties of snobbery – but she is never unkind.'

Endpaper

The endpaper is a fabric bought at John Lewis in the mid-1950s. It is both traditional and modernist, while the sombre colours suit the mood of the stories.