Good Evening, Mrs Craven

Good Evening, Mrs Craven is a collection of morose little stories about the left behind well-to-do of England during WW2.

Panter-Downes' style is economical and aphoristic, describing the bucolic scenes with an emotive, painterly delicacy, though terse and minimalist; focus is instead given to character dialogue and internal monologuing. Her prose clearly reproduces English dialects in a delightful, and highly readable, manner.

In the epilogue, it is mentioned that some critics back home in England had felt the stories falsely represented the realities of the war for the majority of the country, who were suffering enormously more than the dotty old madams. This makes sense, given that Panter-Downes' stories focused on the stranded English gentry as they were evaporating beneath the weight of the frequently mentioned ‘social revolution' occuring at the time. However, the author was, after all, asked by her American editor (as she wrote for the New Yorker) to keep writing about larny British ladies in their drafty country houses because thats what the Manhattanites wanted to read. Her depiction of idyllic upper-crust English society was what cemented her fame across the Atlantic, though perhaps it is the historical value of her writing, with its touching prose and quaint cast, that has cemented Good Evening, Mrs Craven's legacy.

One story in particular stood out to me: a woman who longed for the closeness and comradeship that the airr aids had forced into her stilted, austere English life. Her loneliness and attempts to strike up friendship were rendered in soft, heartbreaking prose. It is this scalpel-fine examination of human emotion - without tending towards the clinical - that I appreciated most of all.