Penelope MortimerReviews

I thought about my rating of this for a while but I decided to go with this as I really didn't like it personally, even though I see some merits. The thing is, it's tough to pinpoint what I really dislike and I absolutely acknowledge this might be my own mood and faults. And I think if you've been in a similar situation you would appreciate it a lot more because you'd be able to fill in some of the gaps I found confusing.

The first thing is that the main character shows contempt to pretty much everyone else. At several points (particularly with a character named Philpot) she looks down on people poorer than her. She makes some really dodgy comments on race. She shows no fondness for her children at any point. It's not exactly a good start. She also whines about being rich - this is the most obvious thing for me to explain my dislike of the book. Nothing annoys me more than this. She complains about how having cleaners and nurses have made her feel alienated. Why couldn't she just dismiss the nurses, given she doesn't work and she's apparently not doing other housework? Who knows! Later she apparently has 1 nurse for her large amount of children and does some caring for them but she's annoyed about having to take care of children so I guess nothing pleases her. She reminiscences about a time when she was poor and apparently it was perfect. Incredible. Wow. I feel so sorry for you, having a massive income.

There are vague elements that seem like they're going to be surreal but just resolve into nothing. There's a tower being built in the countryside and things are going to be good after they move in? Sounds interesting. Oh, it just gets built and they live there for a summer and that's it. Wow. Her children are never given a number and most aren't described? Sounds vaguely spooky but several are named and described, she just ignores the vast majority, which makes her seem even more of an ass.

A big element of the book is her children, but as said above she doesn't seem to like them much. She only talks about one in any detail and just gives ages to a few others. Yet she talks about how she wants one, apparently deliberately gets one against the wishes of her husband (somehow? did she mess up contraception or what? surely he'd have expected the possibility? i don't know). Children have defined her life. This probably sounds like it reflects a fundamental ambiguity of being a woman or something but it's written poorly. An event later is really horrible for her and is the one point in the book where I feel incredibly sorry for her yet I still don't understand. She is strongly encouraged to have her uterus removed and fetus aborted under false pretences. Yet she hasn't mentioned why she wants the baby - it seems like a bizarre spur of the moment thing. This is probably a metaphor for womanhood or something but it just doesn't work at all She regularly gets annoyed by her children, yet she hates parting with them or the possibility of them. She doesn't spend time with her children or care for them, yet they're presented as some sort of obstacle in her life. It's baffling.

The most important "poor writing" element is that she never really talks about her feelings. This is a first person narrative yet we rarely get to find out what she's really feeling. There's sort of some of it but mostly she describes events with maybe just "what exact emotion she's feeling at the moment". Yes, to a certain extent it's clear this is deliberate, that she's confused as to how she feels, but it's ridiculous for a whole book.

There's an attempt at treating the events that happen as inevitable but it really doesn't work at all. She clearly acts in ways that changed her life, entirely of her own accord. There's no reason to believe anything in this book is inevitable from the text (even though it is believable in a real life context). She's had children by several different men during long term relationships/marriages, leaving all but two by choice (one by death, one because she's still married). She's apparently still attractive and there's no reason to believe she couldn't leave again but she basically says "oh yeah I can't" at a couple points with no reason - I mean it's weird enough that every one of her partners was totally cool with her previous kids but they apparently were so anything is believable. She describes something bad that happened early on (Simpkin) and I can understand that she was encouraged to do something but it was again her choice, her decisions and what happened was a weird kiss that she stopped of her own accord and was respected in doing so. This is described later on as if it was really awful, the worst thing a man can do. Don't get me wrong - he is clearly a creepy, disgusting, lecherous man. But her reaction doesn't fit her own choice to phone this guy up and ask to meet him while having a vague idea what will happen. The problem again is the emotions are inconsistent and poorly described so even bad events are confusing to understand from her perspective. She talks about inevitability yet at no point does she seem coerced and on the contrary actually takes decisions completely against typical standards for women and succeeds while doing so. There's vague stuff about gender roles but it feels completely unconvincing. Even though I know how awful expectations and pressures on women can be, the book only really vaguely alludes to it. The lack of convincingness is the main problem here.

I could go on. There's just nothing convincing, no real development of character, no way you can really empathise. It just feels like an inconsistent mush, with the actual sad and awful events completely brought down by the set-up. The ending isn't anything special in any respect, although it again tries some vague surrealism and presumably it's symbolic. It does nothing for me really. Just a poor ending to a poor book.

An alright semi-autobiographical look at a marriage riddled with classist, racist whiny garbage. This is everything wrong with white feminism.

While much might be made of this as an “abortion” novel, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is equally concerned with the plight of a well-to-to-woman in an unhappy late-1950s marriage. Ruth Whiting is at loose ends now that her boys have returned to their prestigious private school. Her eldest child, Angela—the reason teenage Ruth had been compelled by her father to marry Rex Whiting—will soon return to Oxford, but the mother-daughter relationship is strained. Angela feels her mother has no interest in her, while Ruth retains a certain degree of resentment of the child who set her life on a seemingly irrevocable course. Over the summer holiday, Ruth’s children have noticed she’s become a little barmy. They joke about it, but they are on to something. Underneath her conventional, gracious-hostess exterior, she’s fragmenting.

After seeing her boys off in London and before catching the train back to her well-appointed home in a quaint village on the outskirts of London, Ruth goes shopping. Among her purchases is a small cradle-shaped music box which plays the traditional English lullaby Goodbye Baby Bunting. Ruth tells herself that it’s for a neighbour’s young child, but she cannot part with it. It is a potent symbol of her experience of empty-nest syndrome as well as the abandonment she feels in the vulnerable-child part of her own psyche. Her husband, Rex Whiting, is a high-end dentist to celebrities, who stays in his London flat during the work week, ostensibly for the sake of convenience, but actually because adultery is a whole lot easier to manage at a distance.

Ruth is just descending into nervous collapse when her daughter suddenly returns home from Oxford to announce she’s pregnant. The “boyfriend” (if you can call him that) is cut from the same boorish cloth as Rex, and Angela certainly does not want to marry him. She also doesn’t want her father to know anything about her situation, believing he’d yell a great deal and likely force her into marriage. Ruth and Angela tentatively bond as they try to obtain abortion services for Angela. Abortion is illegal in the England of 1958.

I have no idea how well Ruth and Angela’s experience seeking abortion reflects that of actual English women in the mid-twentieth century, but the novel made me interested in finding out more.

To her credit, Mortimer provides a realistic conclusion. Mother and daughter have not become kindred spirits, but they share a secret, and Ruth has gained some confidence by competently helping her daughter to steer her life in a different direction from her own.

An absorbing novel. Recommended.

This book, written in 1958, seems more pertinent than ever after the overturning of Roe v. Wade
"My personhood was erased and overwritten with MOTHER before I even knew who I was."

Ruth is a sad and desperate housewife in suburban London. Her overbearing and cruel husband Rex works in the city and is home only on the weekends for the neighborly rounds of cocktail parties and Sunday brunches. Their boys are away at boarding school and their daughter Angela is in her first year at Oxford. As I began this sad story of Ruth's lonely life, I was immediately reminded of the lives of the women Betty Friedan described in her ground-breaking book The Feminine Mystique.

Then Angela comes home to tell her mother she is pregnant. Ruth is immediately thrown back to her own youth and her own unwanted pregnancy (with Angela), which led to her marriage to Rex. She doesn't want her daughter to experience the same lack of choices and the consequences that she did. And so the quest for a safe abortion for Angela begins, a not so easy task in the 1950's when abortion was illegal in England (and probably most other countries).

The emphasis on the plight of the 50's housewife is beautifully written. The book explores loneliness, isolation, and mental health (not to mention reproductive rights). Although the book is more than 60 years old, it felt very relevant to me.

Recommended.
3 1/2 stars

First Line: "Ruth Whiting stepped out of the high train directly it stopped."

Last line: "Avoiding the carelessly abandoned bicycles, the gum boots, she went into the house."½

Penelope Mortimer es una genia. Una escritora difícil e incómoda pero con una capacidad para mantener el interés en ese mundo en el que consigue introducirnos al inicio de la novela. Nada es anecdótico ni superficial aquí, ni los secundarios se salvan de la representación, y el lenguaje es determinante.
La novela comienza describiendo el contexto de los lujosos suburbios londinenses en el que se desenvuelven las clases medias adineradas, igualadas como alumnos de la misma clase, “son todos prácticamente de la misma edad, visten el mismo tipo de ropa, y están especializados, con casi indistinguibles grados de éxito, en la asignatura del dinero.”
Pero rápidamente comienza una segunda parte en la que salta el conflicto que la protagonista, Ruth, debe solucionar mientras papaíto sale a cazar un conejo para envolver con su piel al bebé.
Ruth termina su cometido con éxito y se redime en cierta medida, pero no consigue rematar la jugada, porque sabe, como Santa Teresa, y casi 30 años antes que Capote, que se derraman más lágrimas por las plegarias atendidas que por las que no han tenido respuesta. Y la suya era “la última evasión, una plegaria no atendida, imposible de atender.”
Ma-ra-vi-llo-sa

What are children? Why do women have them? Those were the puzzling parts to me and the narrator. An odd but interesting read.

This is another book I picked up thanks to this excellent book list article in the TLS.

The stories in this collection depict some rather everyday mundane events in an incredibly emotionally vivid way, casting a series of harrowing pictures of depressed and oppressed women and girls in unpleasant relationships. The was made all the more poignant when I looked up Penelope Mortimer's obituary online and discovered that much of this was semi-autobiographical.

There is one bit of quite shocking casual racism in one of the stories which threw me out of the narrative. And one of the stories featured some unsettling animal neglect which I just couldn't stomach. (how is it that I can manage to read about people being shits to other humans but I couldn't stomach the animal cruelty?) Apart from these two bits, this is an extremely well written and evocative collection - just have something or someone cheerful on hand to pick you back up afterwards.

I suspect this would have been a powerful book when it was first written, and it's a fast read, but I have to admit that I wanted more from it. Though there were parts that I found really engaging and worthwhile, it felt like style and intention overtook any real depth in story or character, both of which I wanted more of. There were times when I felt the book could have been stronger if lengthened and given that depth, and other times when I felt it really should have been much shorter, given the author's apparent intentions. It's possible that that's a signal of the times--and that it needed to be this length to make its point, upon first publication--but in any case, I can't say that this really lived up to my expectations or made me want more from the writer. I can see it being something studied in English classes, but not something I'd be likely to recommend outside of to readers looking for a very specifically feminist and satirical novel of its time. It just fell flat for me in too many ways.

Nobody inspires in me as much intense sorrow, rage, and fear as Mortimer consistently does in her stories.

She mines the rich elements of terror in domesticity: the deep discontent in everyday lives and relationships, the questionable compromises, the turbulent unhappiness brewing beneath the polite façade of domestic bliss. She makes my fist clench, jaw tense, heart quicken, my breath stop. She makes me squirm with discomfort, seethe with fury, almost mad with despair.

It's almost vicious this unhappiness that she inflicts on me, yet I cannot help but seek her out for more.

Favourite stories: Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, I Told You So, and What a Lovely Surprise.½

I had been aware of this novel for years, but really can’t think why I haven’t read it till now. Penelope Mortimer is a writer I have read just once before, Daddy’s Gone-A-Hunting, published by Persephone is a beautifully written novel about a woman’s nervous breakdown. With this novel, we are definitely in familiar territory but The Pumpkin Eater, in my opinion is an even better novel. This is a novel about the pitfalls of marriage and motherhood, Mortimer’s simple prose is wonderfully immersive, dreamy and intimate.

“I want to fly from a window and pour through the air like a wind of love to raise his hair and slide into the palms of his hands.”

Reading Daphne Merkin’s introduction to this edition, it is clear that there is a lot about this novel that is autobiographical. Merkin suggests that the novel reads like a work of catharsis. In this novel Mortimer has reproduced something of her own tumultuous marriage, and there are other painful episodes in the novel which come from life too.

We only ever know our narrator as Mrs Armitage, the doctor – to whom she is talking about the wool drawer that her mother had had years before – calls her this, and we never do learn her first name. Whatever her name; it is not Penelope; Mortimer may have taken much directly from her own life – but she did not put herself into her central character. Whatever else was happening in her private life, Penelope Mortimer had her own professional and creative life – Mrs Armitage has never been more than a wife and mother. Her husband, Jake is a screenwriter – he has a rich, creative, rewarding life, filled with travel and acclaim. Jake’s wife is part of his home life – an attractive feature of his home, an accessory. The couple live in London but are building a glass tower in the country – with the intention that it will one day, become the family home. Mrs Armitage proudly tells the doctor about the tower. We sense immediately this happy ever after is an unrealistic expectation, that fairy tale ending perhaps, that we so often strive for.

Speaking to us from her therapist’s couch as the novel opens, Mrs Armitage is at once a warm and confiding voice. so wryly, intelligent, I liked her enormously straight away.

“I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I’m like, how can I know what I want? I only know that whether I’m good or bad, whether I’m a bitch or not, whether I’m strong or weak or contemptible or a bloody martyr – I mean whether I’m fat or thin, tall or short, because I don’t know – I want to be happy.”

Jake is our narrator’s fourth husband, she a mother to an enormous brood of children – from this, and her previous marriages – who are equally nameless – sixteen-year-old Dinah is the only one who we meet and whose name we learn. All the rest are a homogenous whole – the youngest is just three – and there is a nurse employed to help care for them. What will she do then if she doesn’t go on having children? She rather likes the idea of having yet another child, Jake is dead set against it. Throughout the novel we sense the children running in and out of rooms, calling for attention, as their mother Mrs Armitage is either falling apart – or trying to hold things together.

Slowly Mrs Armitage begins to piece together what is going on in her head, she has broken down in Harrods’ linen department weeping great tears over the linen.

“I began drinking because the thought that I was drinking gave me a kind of identity: each time I poured myself a brandy in the deserted afternoon I could say to myself ‘I am a woman who drinks.”

Mrs A is very comfortably off, Jake has been successful for a number of years, and she wants for nothing, and yet this comfortable existence only serves to highlight her isolation, depression and fragility. Mrs A has had her whole life directed by men, from her parents’ home she entered into a series of marriages and had children it is the one thing she knows how to do. At the heart of the problem of course is her marriage, her husband’s betrayals are bruising – yet all he can do is shrug them off – as little nothings. (Can I just mentioned I wanted to punch Jake).

She remembers a time when a friend from school came to stay, the fifteen-year-old Mrs A, had a quiet little passion for the vicar’s son, her friend Ireen is younger and quite the femme fatal. Ireen is desperate to have ‘a story’ to take back to school – and her friend is soon disenchanted with the girl who at school seemed so wonderful. There’s an uncomfortable encounter with a much older man, who Mrs A is reminded of suddenly, in the person of an unpleasant social acquaintance, when Jake brings all the film people to the house for a party.

The Pumpkin Eater is a powerful novel, I loved it. A book I had suggested to my book group – but they didn’t pick it, so I read it anyway. I would have been interested to talk to them about it – there are definitely feminist issues at the heart of it.

Edited to add – a big big thank you to Thomas from Hogglestock for this book, which I won on his blog.

For months, ever since she had first seen the new house, her own [spirits] had been soaring. She have rediscovered energy that she thought had long ago died; at the prospect of living by herself, in her own home, without Graham, without the load of a marriage that had become intolerable, she had felt herself flung helter-skelter without time to assess or reason, into a life of hope and good sense. She had been unable to sleep at nights, hurrying out of bed to add something more to a list, to write some reminder to herself; or else she had lain on the back, her arms behind her head, smiling at her fantasies and almost unendurably impatient. It seemed at this time incredible to her that she could have endured the last five years of her marriage. She did not even think about it, erasing a quarter of a century of love and passion and habit with plans for curtain rails and bookshelves and where the pictures would hang and what, above all, she would create for her children: after years of anxiety and distress there would once more be a home. She would make it alone, untrammelled, a free human being.

Just as she did in The Pumpkin Eater, the author here explores the roles of motherhood and wifehood acting as a prison on a woman's identity. Specifically she looks at what happens post-motherhood and post-wifehood, the inability as well as the reluctance to let go of an identity which has so defined and, in turn, restricted you.

I'm in awe of the way she can so deftly illustrate in just a few lines the complex history and dynamics of a family relationship, the things said and left unsaid, the years of enforced closeness which has now also armed you with the weapons required for its utter destruction. This is only my second Mortimer but definitely not my last.

"I know there's an awful lot of us..."
By sally tarbox on 5 May 2018
Format: Kindle Edition
On her fourth marriage - to an increasingly successful but philandering screenwriter - the narrator is mother to a large number of children from her marriages, and is starting to crack up.
This is no normal family tale- only one child is ever named and given any character. The rest remain an amorphous group in the background. We drift through her life - from her visits to a psychologist, back to her teens, through her life pre-Jake, money worries...and on to the present celebrity lifestyle.
The narrator seems to have lost control of her life...marrying Jake was followed by her passively but reluctantly allowing the eldest to be sent to boarding school; with financial security comes a breakdown in the family:
"I imagined I'd have more time for Jake. But we all began to live alone, that's what really happened. We got men in to paint the rooms, and we didn't have to wash up any more, the children didn't come and grate cheese or make biscuits, in the evening they watched television, but not with us, and in the afternoons they went out for walks with the help. We drove about alone in our cars and we went away for holidays without Jake, because he was working."
In a fragile mental state, she is about to sacrifice yet more for her husband's convenience...
Evokes the 1960s, very well written.

By no means perfect in its bleak and darkly-humoured depiction of a woman struggling with depression and marriage and life in general, the incessant but subtle claustrophobia-inducing pressure of the plot and the prose nonetheless had me unexpectedly weeping silently on the plane.

The story of a woman on her fourth marriage to a man who is a slave to getting on in the world of film production. The marriage lacks the chance for either parent to expand their experience of life beyond the accumulation of things and the provision of goodies for their many step-children. The situation is desperate for Mrs. Armitage; her husband Jake is jaded by affairs with friends and film-set trash. He is locked into his developing fame and the film milieu. She is rendered estranged from life as even domestic life is denied her with the arrival of home “help”.
The men in the story are nasty, especially Conway (played by a clipped moustachioed, heavy-rimmed glasses, James Mason in the film of the book). The sixties was particularly awful for women who had yet to find a counter to male coercion and the power to control both the domestic and financial life of families.
The woman is thrown back on her only available source of fulfillment, another baby. The result is disastrous. The ending leaves the reader to imagine how she has resolved her situation in a memorable last chapter. This takes place in a newly constructed glass tower (a Freudian folly, perhaps) wherein the family has been long planning to live.
Read the book, see the film.

Muriel Rowbridge, is the only woman in a group of journalists on a cultural visit to Canada. She is single, in her late 20s, and recovering from a mastectomy and a relationship that failed shortly after (or as a result of?) her surgery. Immersed in the masculine social norms of her business trip, she spends a lot of time in her own head, trying to sort out what she wants from life. In the course of the trip she is attracted to two very different men: Robert, a wealthy businessman, and Alex, a film-maker. Both encounters proceed quickly towards sexual intimacy, and Muriel fears the consequences of revealing her prosthetic breast. The two relationships move along very different paths, and each in their own way help Muriel rebuild her self-image and become a sexual being again.

This novel, published in 1967, struck me as ground-breaking in many ways. Muriel is a single, independent woman holding her own against men in her field. But perhaps more importantly, Penelope Mortimer deals openly with breast cancer and its impact on a woman's sexuality. This is a worthy and memorable book.

I'm so glad that this lovely green VMC, moved from shelf to shelf for some 15+ years, caught my eye. It's solid middle-brow, which is pretty much where mine stays. Muriel Rowbridge, a journalist for a woman's magazine 5 months after her single mastectomy, flies from England to Canada with a group of male journalists. Muriel has been instructed to enjoy herself, become involved in the group, and not (in her own mind) to drift away Virginia Woolfishly. She writes in her journal a lot as she becomes more or less involved with two men: one with whom she has sex and one with whom she falls in love.
Mortimer is a beautiful writer. Muriel's musings are her consciousness stream, revealing her continuing confusion, anger, and hurt but also often very funny commentary. The humor brings the 60s back to me immediately, and I still think it's funny. Prime example: Muriel is whisked away for "'a little get-together with some of the girls from our top women's journals...they are, of course, just fascinated to meet a real working press woman like themselves, with the same problems and the same, well, background. They're all college girls, of course - I expect you're a college girl yourself, Muriel?'
She nodded, dumb. Words started going through her brain like a tune: Lord support us all the day long of this troublous life till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes..." Muriel, wisely, flees.
A controlling motif is the fable of the scorpion and the frog, and Muriel does remain herself to the end. Recommended! (And SHORT!!)½

A very unusual book. You get the feeling of being in a flashback to so many things - the 1960s, feminism, finding oneself, the dreary, vacuous hotels and strippers in nightclubs, psycho-something films, and the revolving door of feelings being explored again and again.

Very readable , flowing account of life and times of Penelope Mortimer. Personal, perceptive, fascinating family life included.

In this autobiographical novel, a woman struggles with depression and fights to find her sense of purpose while dealing with a bad marriage and a philandering husband. Mrs. Armitage has several children from multiple marriages and is now married to Jake, a screenwriter. She has no real friends; life revolves around her home and children. They are sufficiently well off to afford childcare and a cook, leaving Mrs. A with little to do. Early on Jake cheats on her, with an old school friend at that, but she chooses to believe his denial because really, what other options does she have? Things go from bad to worse, and for the most part this story is told with dark humor. But it's ultimately a stark portrait of marriage and motherhood, that doesn't glamorize in the least.½

Historic value, although I did not see it as a pre-feminist study of a woman trapped in societal (male-dominated) demands and expectations. I thought of it mostly as a study in selfishness.

Amazing how I'm nothing at all like this book's nameless narrator or its doppelgänger author, Penelope Mortimer, and yet I identified with it through and through. What a tour de force of the inner life, so wrenching, so funny, so readable. I got through it in a day, in one compulsive gulp. Marvelous.

The Pumpkin Eater is a story loosely based on the life of Penelope Mortimer, though fictionalized and hyperbolized in some ways. A woman with too many children (more than is ever made clear in the prose) is stuck between her desire to have more children and to not fall out of love with her fourth husband, a screenwriter.

In this book, not quite as feminist as, say, Gilman, we have a story similar to her Yellow Wallpaper, in which we find yet another diary of a mad woman, going slowly madder and madder.

My biggest issue with the edition I read was the foreword by Daphne Merkin, which chronicled the life of Mortimer and drew parallels between her life and the life of the protagonist of The Pumkin Eater, Mrs. Armitage. Basically, if you're one who is averse to spoilers, you may want to treat it as an afterword.

The book was short and written almost stream of consciousness at times, and almost like a play at others. It's not the most positive book, but probably worth a read by readers of feminist literature or readers of depressing literature. People who want happy fiction with traditional gender roles and whatnot need not bother.½

This dark satire explores a difficult marriage and the demands of parenthood through the eyes and voice of a depressed and possibly somewhat delusional wife, the mother of an unnamed huge number of children by a variety of fathers, whose husband is, obviously to the reader and less obviously, at least some of the time, to the narrator, wildly unfaithful. The two things that make this a compelling read are the narrator's voice, completely unsentimental, sometimes very funny, and always wickedly perceptive, even of her own situation, and Mortimer's wonderful ear for dialogue throughout the novel. The beginning section in which the narrator talks to a completely obtuse and very Freudian psychiatrist is terrific (and, speaking of Freud, what to make of the glass tower she and her husband are building in the country?). Much of this novel, including its most horrifying part, is a thinly disguised fictionalization of Mortimer's own life but, unlike the protagonist narrator, she was able to create something from the pain and loneliness of her marriage and her life.

Penelope Mortimer, or should I say the character of Mrs. Armitage, is an illustration of a woman in chaos, the smudged pencil sketch or what the sound of "din" looks like. She's going through a breakdown and "The Pumpkin Eater" is her therapy, Mortimer's therapy. There can be no doubting that this brutally honest and amusing tale is, in a great part, autobiographical. And yet, Mortimer wields each word like a nocked arrow, making it touching, but without an ounce of sentimentality.

The mother (but not the caretaker) of countless children, the narrator seems lost in a world of "...orange squash, blackcurrant syrup, tins of soup or beans or salmon, disinfectant or instant coffee...", trapped in her mind like she's trapped in the glass tower her husband built for her. This dream-castle serves as both physical barrier (not to mention the Freudian implications of a large, fragile phallus in the middle of the countryside) and delusional whimsy. Her husband's transgressions are unhidden, transparent, testimony for his wife's mental trials.

In all the chaos, you might think it would be difficult to find a thru-line, a string tied to a life preserver, tossed into an unforgiving sea. But it's there, in the form of the Armitages' daughter, Dinah. Insignificant at first, indistinguishable from the circus of little ones, Dinah's importance grows, and it is in her mother's awareness of this growth that the chaos finally subsides.

This tide-like narrative is somewhat reminiscent of another woman's chaotic semi-autobiographical novel: Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz. If Zelda had been a little less delusional, a little more honest, a little less oppressed, a little more depressed, a little less vivacious, and a little more prolific (okay maybe a lot more prolific), she might have been Penelope Mortimer or her literary twin, Mrs. Armitage.

But compared to Save Me the Waltz, Armitage's break is more present. The writer is more aware of herself, and there's an element of the story actually being composed, rather than lived--you really notice this in her treatment of Ireen, and in the way the character seems to ironically haunt the rest of the story. It's the kind of thing where you can hear the writer, amidst the depression and the victimizing) and pick out her victorious laughter in the midst of the din.

Lauren Cartelli
www.theliterarygothamite.com½

If you are woman, then you need to read the "The Pumpkin Eater" by Penelope Mortimer. The reason why is because this books shows a woman's life and how it is not dominated by other choices but her own. This book, no matter how dark it gets, should serve as an inspiration to all women that a woman's life can be full and enriching as any mans life could be.