Pages:
125
Original
date of publication:
My
edition: 2008
Why
I decided to read:
How
I acquired my copy: October 2011, Persephone subscription
In
Minnie’s Room, a collection of 11 stories published between 1947 and 1965,
Mollie Panter-Downes explores some of the same themes she explores in her
novel, One Fine Day. In the 1940s and beyond, people were struggling to adapt
to their new circumstances, because things were, indeed, dire (for example, as
the introduction to this book says, “bread had been newly rationed in 1946”). It
was rough going for everyone, especially the middle classes, who were hit
especially hard by the imposition of increased income tax to deal with postwar
shortages. So the stories in this collection reflect on a small scale the
larger issues that were going on in England and the world at that time.
Although
there is no immediate theme to this collection, her stories are all about
people dealing with the aftermath of WWII and the effect it had on ordinary
people. So although these characters don’t seem to have a lot in common in the
surface, they all deal with the same kinds of larger issues. The stories deal
with a variety of characters in varying situations. In the titular “Minnie’s
Room, “a middle-aged live-in cook threatens to leave and find a place of her
own; in “Beside the Still Waters,” a middle-aged woman returns to her ill
mother’s bedside, only to come face to face with her siblings, with whom she
has nothing in common; in “What Are the Wild Waves Saying?” a girl on a seaside
holiday gets her first, outside glimpse of romance.
All
the stories deal with change in some way and the ways in which various people
cope with it. As the author got father away from the war, you start to see a
shift in the stories away from the war, which makes this collection less of a
cohesive unit than the stories collected in Good Evening, Mrs. Craven. As such,
I didn’t enjoy this collection quite as much, but I thought the author had some
interesting things to say about the passage of time. However, although I’m not
a huge fan of the short story, I’ve always enjoyed the collections that
Persephone reprints.
This
is Persephone no. 34.
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