Mortimer, Penelope Ruth Fletcher

▪ 2000

      British writer (b. Sept. 19, 1918, Rhyl, Flintshire, Wales—d. Oct. 19, 1999, London, Eng.), was the author of about a dozen novels, which were praised for their precision and intelligence and most of which reflected her own unconventional life and relationships and the turbulence of failed marriages. She was married—and divorced—twice and had two children by each husband as well as two by other men. Mortimer also wrote short stories, screenplays, memoirs, book reviews, and biographies. She attended a number of different schools before leaving a difficult home life to attend secretarial school in London. She then began journalism studies at University College, London, but left to take a job at Butlin's holiday camps. In 1937 she married her first husband, Charles Dimont, and in 1947 she published her first novel, Johanna, under the name Penelope Dimont. The couple divorced in 1949, and she married John Mortimer that same year. Two novels, A Villa in Summer (1954) and The Bright Prison (1956), the travel book With Love and Lizards (1957; co-written with her husband), and another novel, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1958; also published as Cave of Ice, 1959), followed, and her reputation was well established. It was for her next novel, The Pumpkin Eater (1962; filmed 1964), that she was best known, however; it was the story of a woman faced with her husband's infidelities after her obsession with motherhood has isolated her emotionally from him. Among her later novels were My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof (1967) and The Home (1971). Although publicly the Mortimers appeared to be the ideal glamorous, chic, and socially well-placed couple, their marriage was disintegrating, and they divorced in 1972. Mortimer then moved to New York, where she wrote Long Distance (1974), one of the few novels ever to be printed completely in The New Yorker, and taught writing. She returned to England in 1977, and her first volume of memoirs, About Time, was published two years later. It was honoured with a Whitbread Prize. A second volume of autobiography, About Time Too, appeared in 1993. Mortimer's last published novel was The Handyman (1983), and in 1986 she brought out the biography Queen Elizabeth: A Life of the Queen Mother. Its revelations of Elizabeth's purported romantic life before she married the future King George VI caused a furore, and in 1995 Mortimer provided a revision, The Queen Mother: An Alternative Portrait of Her Life and Times.

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