Penelope Mortimer

A woman married to her fourth and wealthy husband, and deprived of the domestic trappings that previously defined her, is left with only a capacity for driven love and a facility for seeing through the facade of the world around her.

The Pumpkin Eater

Valerie Grove

Focuses on the expectations of women, about a house-bound mother reluctantly (desperately) at home all day, in contrast to her daughter who has escaped, to university and then, we can assume, to a job. This book came out at a time, when the impact of the new wave of feminism, had not yet arrived.

Daddy's Gone A-hunting

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

Stories

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

The Home

The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist’s couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a vast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful screenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tries to make sense of it all: doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.

El devorador de calabazas

First published 1967. Muriel, a fashion and beauty correspondent, has to cope with an assignment to Canada, her first since having a mastectomy.

My Friend Says It's Bullet-proof

Ruth Whiting, 37, müsste eigentlich glücklich sein. Sie lebt im idyllischen Londoner Umland, hat drei gesunde Kinder, und ihr Zahnarztgatte kommt an den meisten Wochenenden heim. In Wahrheit langweilt sie sich zu Tode, ihr Leben ist eine endlose Aneinanderreihung von Verabredungen mit anderen Vorortfrauen, und bei Kuchen, Sherry und geistlosen Gesprächen verrinnt ihre Zeit. Als ihre 18-jährige Tochter ungewollt schwanger wird, erinnert sich Ruth daran, wie sie jung Mutter wurde, bevor sie überhaupt wusste, wer sie war. Jetzt will sie alles dafür tun, ihrer Tochter eine freie Entscheidung zu ermöglichen. In ihrem 1958 erstmals veröffentlichten Roman seziert Penelope Mortimer mit sarkastischem Humor die Abgründe eines unfreien Frauenlebens und zeigt zugleich den Schmerz ungewollter Mutterschaft. Ein aktuelles Thema, zeitlos brillant erzählt.

Roman

Bevor der letzte Zug fährt

Three British women, a widow, her daughter, and a writer, try to cope with a handyman's unwelcome advances, a husband's infidelity, and loneliness.

The Handyman

F. G. U. Glass

Kann man Jake lieben The pumpkin eater, dt

John Mortimer

With Love & Lizards

Examines the failure of a marriage in a London suburb and its effect upon the entire family.

Cave of Ice

Autobiography 1918-1939

About Time

A Villa in Summer

An Aspect of Autobiography

Biografie van de Engelse koningin-moeder Elizabeth (geb. 1900), echtgenote van George VI.

Penelope Mortimer

About

Books

Join the club