Literary Birthday – 19 September – Penelope Mortimer
Penelope Mortimer was born on 19 September 1918 and died on 19 October 1999.
Penelope Mortimer Quotes
- 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’.
- When I was fourteen I had the world at my feet but somebody didn’t do their job properly and allowed me to sin.
- I was so grateful to anybody who loved me, that was the least I could do. I had a great longing to be loved.
- One dreads the relentlessness of getting older and going gaga.
- I have tried to be honest with you, although I suppose that you would really have been more interested in my not being honest. Some of these things happened, and some were dreams. They were all true, as I understood truth. They are all real, as I understood reality.
Penelope Mortimer was a British journalist, biographer, and novelist. Mortimer wrote more than a dozen novels during her career, most of them focusing on upper middle-class life in British society. Her writing, depicting a nightmarish world of neuroses and broken marriages, influenced feminist fiction of the 1960s. She wrote one novel, Johanna, under the name Penelope Dimont. As Penelope Mortimer she wrote A Villa in Summer, which received critical acclaim. Subsequent novels included Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting and The Pumpkin Eater, an autobiographical novel which dealt with a troubled marriage. In 1964 it was made into a successful film scripted by Harold Pinter and starring Anne Bancroft. She also served as an agony aunt for the Daily Mail under the pseudonym Ann Temple. She wrote two memoirs: About Time: An Aspect of Autobiography, which covered her life until 1939, and won the Whitbread Prize, and a second volume called About Time Too: 1940–1978 was published in 1993.
Source for Image: Open Library
by Amanda Patterson
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