A short life of the author
Penelope Mortimer (19 September 1918 – 19 October 1999) was a British novelist, journalist, and memoirist whose unsparing, psychologically acute fiction about the emotional lives of women — the suffocations of marriage, the ambivalences of motherhood, the terrors of aging and abandonment — anticipated the feminist literary explosion of the 1970s by a decade. Her masterpiece, The Pumpkin Eater (1962), filmed by Jack Clayton from a Harold Pinter screenplay in 1964, is one of the most disturbing and formally accomplished novels about marriage in the English language.
Life
She was born Penelope Ruth Fletcher in Rhyl, North Wales. Her childhood was peripatetic — her father was a Church of England clergyman who moved frequently — and unhappy, marked by emotional coldness and her parents’ troubled marriage. She attended several schools, including University College London.
She married the journalist Charles Dimont in 1937, had two daughters, divorced, and in 1949 married the barrister and playwright John Mortimer (who would later become famous as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey). The marriage to John Mortimer was tempestuous, creatively competitive, and ultimately disastrous. They had four children together (six children total from her two marriages), and the marriage — its betrayals, its intellectual cruelties, its exhausting fertility — became the raw material for her best fiction. They divorced in 1972.
Mortimer supported herself as a journalist (she was film critic for The Observer and a contributor to The New Yorker) and as a novelist. Her later years were marked by relative obscurity and financial difficulty.
The Pumpkin Eater (1962)
Mortimer’s fourth novel is a devastating first-person account of a woman — unnamed, known only as “Mrs. Armitage” — who has had multiple marriages, many children, and a nervous breakdown. The narrative is fragmented, moving between past and present, between the protagonist’s attempts to understand her compulsive fertility and her husband’s infidelities. The prose is controlled, ironic, and emotionally merciless.
The novel draws heavily on Mortimer’s marriage to John Mortimer, and its portrait of a clever, unfaithful husband who treats his wife’s emotional distress as a management problem is lacerating. The film adaptation — with Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Armitage and Peter Finch as her husband, and a screenplay by Pinter that stripped the novel to its essential confrontations — was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Other Fiction
Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting (1958), Mortimer’s third novel, examines a woman whose husband has left her and who must reconstruct her identity outside of marriage. The Home (1971) is set in a convalescent home for women recovering from nervous breakdowns and is Mortimer’s most formally experimental work. Long Distance (1974) chronicles a woman’s solitary life after divorce.
Her fiction is characterised by an absolute refusal of sentimentality about domestic life. Where many mid-century women novelists presented marriage as difficult but ultimately redeemable, Mortimer presents it as a form of psychological warfare in which women are systematically disadvantaged. Her protagonists are intelligent, articulate, and trapped — by children, by social convention, by their own desires.
Memoir
About Time: An Aspect of Autobiography (1979) covers her childhood and first marriage with the same unflinching honesty that characterises her fiction. About Time Too (1993) continues the autobiography into her marriage with John Mortimer and its aftermath. The memoirs are valuable both as literary autobiography and as social history — they document the lives of educated English women in the mid-twentieth century with a specificity and candour that few other writers attempted.
She also published a biography, Queen Elizabeth: A Life of the Queen Mother (1986), which was controversial for its unsentimental portrait of its subject.
Critical Standing
Mortimer has been largely forgotten by the literary mainstream — she appears in few anthologies and is rarely taught. Feminist critics have argued for her recovery, placing her alongside Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Taylor, and Barbara Pym as a mid-century woman novelist whose reputation was suppressed by a literary establishment that devalued domestic fiction. The Pumpkin Eater remains in print and is increasingly recognised as a major novel of the 1960s.
Collecting Mortimer
The Pumpkin Eater (1962, Hutchinson) in first edition with dust jacket brings £50–£200. Her other novels are inexpensive and easily found. The Pinter screenplay adaptation adds cross-collecting interest for film and theatre collectors.