One Fine Day

by Mollie Panter-Downes

Book Overview

It's a summer's day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria, are forced to manage without "those anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and pulled the strings." Their rambling garden refuses...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1454959541
• ISBN13: 9781454959540
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Union Square & Co.
• Length: 184 Pages

Customer Reviews

One Fine Novel

An affecting and realistic look at a day in the life of an upper middle class Englishwoman immediately after WWII. Perceptive description of the adjustments required--to husbands and sons back from the War, to war-related deaths, to economic dislocation, to a return to "normalcy" after six years of utter dislocation. Subtle but vivid descriptions of class and gender consciousness. Unforgettable!

Quiet post-war masterpiece

This book describes one day in post-war rural England. Just one day -- and yet it captures a time and place better than most. I read this book months ago, and it is still with me. A gem.

Beautiful (despite its obvious debts)

This is one of the finest novels to emerge from the Second World War, and greatly deserves to be back in print. Mollie Panter-Downes's debts in this "day in the life" of a family (a father, daughter, and, most crucially, a wife) in a small village outside of London during the year after the cessation of war activities was clearly influenced by Katherine Mansfield's great story "At the Bay" and--even more saliently--by Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY, in form, content, and tone. (Key phrases like "The war is over," here as in Woolf uttered by a wealthy woman past her sexual prime in relief, are directly taken from the Woolf novel.) But despite its derivativeness this is a masterful little novel, and should be accorded a special placed in the literature of the 1940s. Mollie Panter-Downes really could write, and her characters really come alive off the page. The descriptions of the English countryside on a hot day when the world seems still even though the class structure is forever changing are something to relish.