... marvellous skill - a writer who can knock spots off most of her contemporaries. - The Guardian A tragi-comedy published in 1971 that looks at the experience of a woman escaping a broken marriage and trying to make a new home for grown-up children who no longer need her. Dealing with themes of abandonment, loneliness, liberation and love, Eleanor's emotional journey is often raw and dark, but at times funny and uplifting as she grapples with her newfound singledom under the critical eyes of her mother and mother-in-law, and the selfish attitudes of various suitors. Perfectly capturing the tone of the 70s, and the reality faced by so many women when forced to re-assess their roles as wife and mother.

"Daddy's Gone A-Hunting" is about 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. 'The book came out at a time,' writes Valerie Grove (author of the recently published "A Voyage Round John Mortimer") in the Preface, 'when the impact of the new wave of feminism, which would change everything under the banner of women's liberation, had not yet arrived'.In Ruth Whiting's commuter-belt village 'the wives conform to a certain standard of dress, they run their houses along the same lines, bring their children up in the same way; all prefer coffee to tea, all drive cars, play bridge, own at least one valuable piece of jewellery and are moderately good-looking.' Yet Ruth is on the verge of going mad. A 'nervous breakdown' would be a politer phrase, but really she is being driven mad by her life and her madness is exacerbated by everyone's indifference to her plight.Although "Daddy's Gone A-Hunting" is at times excuciatingly funny in its caustic dissection of the people among whom the Whitings live, it is also a profound study of female isolation. As the critic Judy Cooke has pointed out, Penelope Mortimer's novels were 'intense, imaginative explorations of an inner world. It is an enclosed world, dominated by fear, in which physical experiences such as sterilisation and abortion isolate her characters from their fellow beings and are metaphors for a deeper spiritual isolation.'

"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.

Penelope Mortimer's only collection of short stories. A mother and her young son arrive at a rental house in rural France only to find themselves locked out; a fractious family of 5 try and get through a Saturday at home together; a publisher with a penchant for parties reconnects with an old acquaintance who's the life and soul; and a woman in a maternity ward is an unwitting witness to a disturbing drama behind the hospital curtains next to her. Sharp, unsettling, and darkly humourous 'Saturday Lunch with the Brownings' is fiction drawn from life that unerringly captures the complexities and cruelties of family dynamics.

'Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater Had a wife and couldn't keep her...' In this extraordinary, semi-autobiographical novel, Penelope Mortimer depicts a married woman's breakdown in 1960s London. With three husbands in her past, one in her present and a numberless army of children, Mrs Armitage is astonished to find herself collapsing one day in Harrods. Strange, unsettling and shot through with black comedy, this is a moving account of one woman's realisation that marriage and family life may not, after all, offer all the answers to the problems of living.