One Fine Day (Virago Modern Classics)

To illuminate her seeming humdrum narrative (a day in the life of an ordinary woman), Panter-Downes's writing soars into the best kind of prose-poetry. I savored every page.

This book is a forgotten little masterpiece. It describes one hot summer day in the life of a 38-year-old woman, full of nostalgic, elegiac longing. It's 1946 in a beautiful house in a perfect English village. The problem is that Laura and Stephen lived here before the war with two maids, a cook, a gardener and a nanny and now they only have themselves. She is a sweet, loyal, beautiful woman who has no interest, skill, or energy for housework, least of all in the Age of Rationing. She has reached an age where men no longer stare at her lustily, and that's another thing she must adjust to. The processes of her mind are wonderfully and realistically laid down; it is quite unlike any other book I have read. Recommended highly.

Enjoyed this book as the period immediately post World War II interests me, how England, a country that won a war had so much to cope with as victors. Shortages of everything - food, help, basic commodities. A new world looming for everyone.

Once again my favorite genre of times during and after WWII in England. This small book is one of my favorites and remarkable that the story takes place all in one day. The main character's descriptions of places around her and of people are unlike any I have read before. They often made me laugh to myself and wanted to write them down so as to remember them. Great book!

My but this is a well written book about a couple trying to pick up their lives after WWII. Just a delight to read; every word carefully chosen. Perfect images. Highly recommend it.

A brief, subtle, but wonderful evocation of immediate postwar rural England--through the lens of a small family (and mostly through the thoughts of the young wife), in one village, but touching on class, economics, the war, and years of history, compressed into the loving depiction of "one fine [summer's] day."

Brilliantly written, subtly observed, sympathetic portrait of an English village family finding their way forward after surviving World War II. Wonderfully evocative of a beautiful summer day in the English countryside.

I am a fanatic about this type of book, the country, the time period, and the style of writing and I enjoyed reading about the author and the story itself.

It's common knowledge that this is a wonderful book — and I am on the side of the commons. Mollie P-D was not a great literary writer and her instinctive strength (as she recognised) was documentary. But this is a determinedly honest woman trying to come to grips with all the social changes that the war and the Attlee government have brought about presented in skilful fictional form. Viewed from her comfortable middle-class perspective, the changes are not all pleasant, but they are complex and real components of everyday life, which retains a deep lyricism and poetry. So one should "woman up"! If only all public discourse today was as generous and yet tough-minded. A great text for our times.

Nothing much happens in this novel except giving you a good view of a day in the life of a British wife/family just after WW2. I loved it. Panter-Downes makes the place and characters come alive. I am not a fan of books with lots of stressful situations : I like a novel that focuses on character and place development while telling a story. This is done to a very high calibre here. highly recommended.

Loved this. Although it takes place in 1 day, it's so much more. The one day looks back to WW2 and forward to the future. It's a lovely novel with hidden depth.

A slim book of less than 200 pages describing the ordinary uneventful day of a middle-class village housewife. Her dog goes missing, but she gets it back with no difficulty. She goes into the nearest town on a bus, shops for groceries, and comes home. She lingers for a while on a hill and falls asleep, then wakes up and runs home to cook dinner for her ten-year-old daughter and her husband home from his commute to London. That's the sum total of the plot – and one or two of the characters are stereotypes. And you know that every day of the rest of her life will be much the same. But the book is absolute magic, it lifts the heart, and I shall re-read it once a year every year until i die. The beauty is in the details, the observation.

One Fine Day, by Mollie Panter-Downes, is a very good novel indeed about a time of profound change, the people who inhabit that time, and how marriage and other relationships navigate the upheaval. It’s a little dated in syntax and sentiment – it was written in 1946 – but it’s none the worse for that. In its quality of writing, it is far ahead of most of today’s fiction. Overall, I found it to be a very good read, and recommend it with four and a half stars.The story is set on a single warm, sunny day in 1946 – one of the few in that rather miserable summer. It’s set in the South of England, in the village of Wealding, below Barrow Down, within occasional sight of the sea. It’s a relieved England, which has been through the trauma of six years of war: the absence of explosions, of a German threat, of young men being killed is a novelty to be treasured. Societally, on the surface, things are much the same as ever: the English class structure is well defined and clearly in view, the old deference still holds, the lower classes are still in their hovels, the upper orders still languidly in their stately homes. But in fact, everything is changing. The wartime employment and emancipation of women means servants are not to be had. The upper- and upper-middle classes must now fend for themselves. The old lifestyle – shooting, horses, games, lavish entertaining, leisure – has become neither sustainable nor affordable. The aristocrats are being forced, in Attlee’s Socialist Britain, to sell up. In the midst of all this, we see Stephen and Laura Marshall, a married couple probably best characterised as upper middle-class.The story is told mostly through the eyes of Laura. She is a nice lady, well-born, 38, visibly aging, one child (Victoria), well-meaning but not the most competent in practical matters. Stephen is recently returned from several years’ absence in the armed forces. They have during the war grown badly apart. Both know it; neither knows what to do about it. The “lost years” have caused them both deep sadness. Laura is slightly desperate; she knows that she has faded during the war years. Stephen, back from the military, is also something of a fish out of water, but is less able than Laura to see it or acknowledge it. Their familiar pre-war lifestyle and customs are on their last legs; servants upon whom they depended are gone; they are broke and bewildered; their house is falling apart; there is uncomfortable distance between them. Their situation is representative of many thousands like them in post-war Britain. That, and how they deal with it, is the subject of Ms Panter-Downes’ novel.Without enumerating all the scenes, we see Laura ‘on her travels’ – walking, bus and bicycle – on one day. We meet the remaining servants, Mrs Prout and Mr Voller. We visit the market town of Bridbury and encounter the various classes: the lower-class Porters, Mr Vyner the vicar, the local “gypsy” in his shack, the ‘Big House’ Cranmers, the Herriots – Laura’s well-to-do family, daughter Victoria and the unpretentious Watsons. And so goes the panorama. In its stratification, it’s a picture of a society in its time. In a few years, it would be gone, but it’s a fascinating snapshot nevertheless.Laura, on this lovely day, decides on a whim to climb to the top of Barrow Down, with the family dog Stuffy. At the same time, in London, Stephen is meeting an old pre-war acquaintance. Both feel pangs of regret and depression. Laura in particular regrets her wartime separation from Stephen, her faded beauty, how they no longer truly live or are happy together, how much they have diverged. Feeling the emptiness of his meeting, Stephen feels a sudden desire for Laura and rushes home, to find the house inexplicably empty. In the meantime, Laura has fallen asleep at the top of the hill. She wakes, happy, well-slept, conscious of their good fortune in having survived the war, and full of a need to see Stephen. She also hastens homeward.And that’s it. We don’t see the meeting of Laura and Stephen and the hoped-for reconciliation. All this was written in an era when marriage was much more indissoluble than now. One suspects that many modern unions wouldn’t stand the strain. But we end wishing Laura and Stephen well for their future. A good book, very much worth a read.