My Husband Simon tells the story of the married life of Nevis Falconer, a young woman novelist, and Simon Quinn. Temperamentally unsuited, they are only kept together by a mutual physical attraction, in spite of innumerable quarrels. They live this superficial existence for three years, until one day Nevis meets Marcus Chard, her American publisher, who has just arrived in London. Soon friendship develops into love. Inevitably the problem faces her. Wife or mistress? Nevis finds herself caught in a whirl of circumstances over which she has no control. Published in 1931 in the immediate aftermath of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover controversy, Mollie Panter-Downes’s book explores the different echelons of the increasingly self-conscious middle class and the ways in which the tensions and nuances of vocabulary, dress, occupation, politics, taste and, ultimately, the literary world contribute to the incompatibility of a marriage. Part of a curated collection of forgotten works by early to mid-century women writers, the British Library Women Writers series highlights the best middlebrow fiction from the 1910s to the 1960s, offering escapism, popular appeal and plenty of period detail to amuse, surprise and inform. "Mollie Panter-Downes is as profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parke r." --Independent on One Fine Day Mollie Panter-Downe s’s (1906–1997) first book was published when she was only seventeen and her remarkable post-war novel One Fine Day is recognized as a modern classic. She is also remembered for her fortnightly "Letters from London" which appeared in the New Yorker from 1938 through to the 1980s and provided an American readership with a warm and detailed "voice" of everyday life in England and its capital. New York. Autumn, 1930. I sometimes wonder, looking back at everything with the experience that four years ought to have brought, whether I would make up my mind quite so precipitously to marry Simon Quinn if I met him for the first time to-day. There are moods in which I tell myself: “Not a hope! Freedom and work are the only important things. My God, haven’t four years taught you anything at all, you damn little fool?” But at the back of my head I know quite clearly that if it happened all over again I should marry Simon just the same. I could yell and scream; I could run away to some place six weeks from Southampton by a fast boat. Running would only bring me back to the inevitable fact, like one of those dreams in which you tear out of a room in a crazy, nameless panic, and find yourself back again where you started. London four years ago—more than four years, really, for it was at the end of a scorching week in July. Over here they laugh at English summers, but that week had seemed like something angry, slowly gathering and throbbing to a white-hot head. In the late afternoons I went into the Park and sat limply on the grass by the Serpentine; the trees on the other side looked unreal and a little distorted, as though a sheet of hot glass were stretched between them and me. Even the pavements seemed to sweat. At night you saw people strolling with linked arms, and pale, relaxed faces that reminded you of those starry kinds of flowers that only open up in the cool of the evening. It was the week-end of the Eton and Harrow match. The streets were full of small boys walking about behind haystacks of cornflowers; cars were tied up with pale-blue ribbons like cart-horses at a country fair. I had been up to the ground with Roddy Talent on Friday and had walked round, eyeing the other women’s clothes until a rather nice pair of Hanan shoes were grey with dust and hurting me like the devil. It was all rather stupid, rather pointless, very charming, unmistakably British. I remembered that Soames Forsyte had gone to Lord’s and had seen Irene there in a dove-coloured dress. Te thought quite cheered me; at that time Galsworthy was my god. I don’t suppose that I watched more than a couple of overs. On Saturday I was going down for a short week-end to the Fentons’ at Burnham Beeches. Te thought of getting away from the smell of hot pavement and hot people was rather nice; still, I packed in a bad temper. Mrs. Proutie, my charwoman, had not turned up that morning to get my breakfast. I lived in a tiny flat with bright yellow walls and a geyser as temperamental as a prima donna. Proutie got my breakfast; then I settled down and worked until I got hungry, when I either dug up some biscuits and went on working, or else ran round the corner to a little restaurant. The same little restaurant supplied my dinner, unless some man took me out. Quite simple, you see, when it worked. Unfortunately, Proutie was like the geyser, temperamental. I couldn’t rely on her, but she was always cheerful, and, so far as I could see, didn’t steal the gin. That morning I had made coffee and sliced a grape-fruit for mysel