Mollie Panter-Downes was hired by the New Yorker magazine in the years prior to WWII to provide very short fictional stories based on real world London life for the American jet-set. As WWII came, Mollie changed her 'Letter from London' to be about life for the English left behind while the men went off to fight in the war. The letters are a collection of very short stories that focused on the mundane rather than the horror of living in the war. Some of the stories grab you, some I just quickly skimmed. I really didn't find the book as interesting as I had hoped. It's a very quick read though, so little lost. ( )

Superb war time stories set among those Keeping the Home Fires burning while the menfolk were away..
The wealthy, struggling along minus servants; those forced to share a home with friends or evacuees; sewing parties; a wife preparing for her husband's departure..
Originally written for the American audience of the New Yorker, these are quite superb; humorous, touching and well observed.
Could anything beat this description of an unlovely working class evacuee infant:
"The baby, sitting impassively in its mother's arms, wore a dirty red knitted cap in which it oddly resembled a wizened old sans-culotte, a mummified Marat with a snotty nose."
Brilliant writing. ( )

" 'Don't think I'm being stupid and morbid,' she said, 'but supposing anything happens. I've been worrying about that. You might be wounded or ill and I wouldn't know.' She tried to laugh. 'The War Office doesn't have a service for sending telegrams to mistresses, does it?'

"He frowned, because this sounded hysterical ... With an effort, she remembered that he loved her because she was not the kind of woman to make scenes ..."

"Wartime was a period of intense and varied creativity for Mollie Painter-Downs. She was in her prime and bristling with the writer's powers of perception.

"Her best short stories do not depend on conventional action-driven plots because their sphere is psychological, emotional and social. They are brief, dramatic -- and comic -- testimonials to the ordinary English women who did not fight in the war, but lived through it as acutely as any soldier."
~~front flap

Vignettes more than short stories -- most 5 pages long, or less. But woven with amazing accuracy into the emotions of the women portrayed -- always evocative, always of a woman who you might know. Compelling and thought provoking, and well worth the read. Or the reread. ( )

These WWII homefront pieces that were originally published in The New Yorker were almost all from points of view that I had never read/heard before. Some of them were rather depressing, others inspiring. Again, it was educational and entertaining to read a different point of view that usual.

http://webereading.com/2017/12/a-stack-of-eight.html ( )

Lovely collection of stories, from funny to sad, a little trip into life during the war for a small subset of English women. ( )