Good Evening, Mrs. Craven

Mollie Panter-Downes

Apr 2024 · Macmillan Collector's Library · Narrated by Lucy Scott

About this audiobook

Good Evening, Mrs Craven brings together twenty-one of Mollie Panter-Downes’ short stories. Originally published in The New Yorker between 1939 and 1944, these stories have been reprinted and presented as a collection by Persephone Books. This audio edition is read by Lucy Scott.

These stories explore almost every aspect of English domestic life during the Second World War: separation, fear, and obsessions with food, sewing parties, evacuees’ journeys, and the camaraderie of the Blitz. Above all, Panter-Downes portrays the changes and social revolutions which took place during wartime.

Good Evening, Mrs Craven is part of the Persephone Audiobook Collection, a series of forgotten classics including neglected fiction and non-fiction by women writers. This edition includes a preface by author Gregory LeStage.

About the author

Mollie Panter-Downes 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. Her first novel, The Shoreless Sea, written and published while Mollie was still a teenager, was a bestseller. She wrote articles, short stories and three more novels. In 1929 she married Clare Robinson, travelled around the world, and then moved to Surrey, where she and her family lived for over sixty years. Each day Mollie took a basket with her lunch to a writing hut where, between 1938 and 1984, she wrote 852 pieces for The New Yorker, including ‘Letters from London’, book reviews, and short stories. She died in 1997 aged ninety.