Thurber continues (in the preface to a book of Mary Petty’s cartoons published in 1946) : ‘Her drawings are always funny, and often uproarious, but …we can see beneath the fun, the sharpness of her thrust, the way (to take a line from one of her characters) she hits out at life. In those awful houses her imagination has invaded, she has done a beautiful job on the stuffy, the arrogant, the idle, the complacent, and the empty.’