Penelope Mortimer wrote (during the second half of the twentieth century) acerbic novels and stories about middle-class marriages and the frustrations of family life. She also wrote for newspapers and television, and collaborated with her second husband on a travel book. She published a biography of the Queen Mother and two volumes of an autobiography. A third volume was never printed.
Milestones
1 October 1962 PM's novel
The Pumpkin Eater, about a woman miserable about her husband and obsessed with motherhood, and again codedly about her own marriage, turned out to be her first big success.
June 1974 PM issued
Long Distance, a novel which was also carried in its entirety in the
New Yorker (something the magazine had not done since
J. D. Salinger's
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter, in 1955).
19 October 1999 PM died of lung cancer in a
London hospice at the age of eighty-one.
