Penelope Mortimer THE PUMPKIN EATER First Penguin Edition
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Penelope Mortimer THE PUMPKIN EATER First Penguin Edition
First edition, first print Penguin paperback of THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer and published by Penguin Books Ltd., UK, in 1964. It was first published in 1962 by Hutchinson.
The book is in good condition for its age (clean covers with minor rubbing to a couple of the corners, light creasing line across the bottom front corner, and another across the middle at the back, brownish stain inside the front cover). There is some tanning to the pages. Otherwise, internally, all the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions.
Penelope Mortimer (1918–1999) was born Penelope Ruth Fletcher in North Wales, the younger of two children of an Anglican clergyman father and his wife. The family moved often, and Penelope was educated at half a dozen institutions before spending a year at the University of London. In 1937 she married the journalist Charles Dimont, with whom she had two daughters. Two more daughters by two different men would follow before, in 1949, she divorced Dimont and married the barrister, novelist, and playwright John Mortimer, with whom she had another daughter and her only son. The Mortimers were celebrated as 'the last word in marital chic,' but the marriage was tumultuous and the couple divorced in 1972.
In addition to The Pumpkin Eater (1962) - made into a 1964 film from a screenplay by Harold Pinter and starring Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft, who won an Oscar nomination for her role - Mortimer published several other novels, including Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1958), Long Distance (1974), and The Handyman (1983); a travel book co-authored with John Mortimer, With Love and Lizards (1957); and a biography of the Queen Mother. She also served as a film critic for the London Observer and was a regular contributor of short stories to The New Yorker. The first volume of her autobiography About Time (1979) was awarded the Whitbread Prize and was followed by About Time Too (1993). A third volume, Closing Time, is unpublished.
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.
"In this moving novel Penelope Mortimer sheds a tear for every woman — her whims, her frailty, her indomitable loyalty. The Pumpkin Eater is the story of the emotional breakdown of a mother of many children and of her husband’s estrangement. From cause and consequence, from past and present, Mrs Mortimer touches in the little world of one sad person with the patient art of the miniaturist. Her sentences - so seemingly simple - ring in turn with humour, poetry, and heartbreak, as her central character slips deeper and deeper into the twilight between resignation and despair.
Cover still shows Anne Bancroft in a scene from the Rumulus - Jack Clayton film production of The Pumpkin Eater, a Columbia picture starring Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, and James Mason, from the screen-play by Harold Pinter."
'One of those novels which seem to be written with real knowledge of the brink of the abyss, taut almost beyond endurance' - Julian Mitchell in the Sunday Times.
'Beautiful...almost every women I can think of will want to read this book' - Edna O'Brien in the Daily Express
157 pages.
ISBN: n/a
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Penelope Mortimer THE PUMPKIN EATER First Penguin Edition