Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting

Penelope Mortimer (1918–1999) was the author of nine novels; one collection of short stories; two volumes of memoir, the Whitbread Prize-winning About Time and About Time Too; and a biography of the Queen Mother. Her screenwriting credits include the script for Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1964), which she co-wrote with her then husband John Mortimer. She was also a film critic for The Observer.

A breakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion—“her style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel” (Rachel Cooke, The Observer)A bourgeois housewife, Ruth Whiting, is “paralysed by triviality,” measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge parties—routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter, eighteen-year-old Angela, is at Oxford; and their sons are at boarding school. When Angela finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, Ruth realizes that she has to do everything in her power to stop her daughter from sleepwalking into a life like her own. First published in 1958, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting shocked critics with its “feminine rage” (New York Times). It captures the suffocation of a repressive marriage and the desperate longing for connection between a mother and daughter who must join forces in a man’s world.