Note: Mary Patricia "Mollie" Panter-Downes (25 August 1906—22 January 1997) was a novelist and newspaper columnist for The New Yorker. Aged sixteen, she wrote The Shoreless Sea which became a bestseller; eight editions were published in 1923 and 1924, and the book was serialised in The Daily Mirror. Her second novel The Chase was published in 1925.
After her marriage to Aubrey Robinson in 1927, the couple moved to Surrey, and in 1938 Panter-Downes began writing for the New Yorker, first a series of short stories, and from September 1939, a column entitled Letter from London, which she wrote until 1984. The collected columns were later published as Letters from England (1940) and London War Notes (1972).
After visiting Ootacamund, in India, she wrote about the town, known to all as Ooty, in her New Yorker columns. This material was later published as Ooty preserved.
Mollie Panter-Downes died in Compton, Surrey, aged 90.
Selected works:
- The Shoreless Sea (1923) - The Chase (1925) - My Husband Simon (1931) - One Fine Day (1947) - Minnie's Room (Short stories collected between 1947–1965) Republished by Persephone Books in 2002. - Good Evening, Mrs Craven (short stories collected between 1938–1944) Republished by Persephone Books in 1999. - Ooty preserved: a Victorian hill station (1967).
Biographical Notes
Note: In her last months, Mollie was looked after at Eastbury Manor, Compton, Surrey, where she died on 22 January 1997. She was cremated, and her ashes were scattered round her writing hut in the woods at Roppeleghs, her house in Surrey between Chiddingfold and Haslemere. Her obituary in the New Yorker described her as ‘A strikingly good-looking woman, with a tremendously patrician nose and startling blue eyes’. Mollie Panter-Downes also published two excellent non-fiction works, Ooty Preserved: a Victorian Hill Station in India (1967), an evocation of Anglo-Indian life that explores the same territory as Paul Scott's novel Staying On, and At The Pines: Swinburne and Watts-Dunton in Putney (1971), which describes the poet's thirty years with his devoted friend in their house at 11 Putney Hill; both books were first serialized in the New Yorker. The wartime New Yorker letters were further collected in London War Notes (1972).
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