As her 1962 novel The Pumpkin Eater becomes a Penguin Classic, Rachel Cooke re-examines the life of Penelope Mortimer, who tackled difficult subjects in a style that still sounds vital today

‘Attentive to emotional weather’: Penelope Mortimer photographed by Ida Kar in 1961.
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‘Attentive to emotional weather’: Penelope Mortimer photographed by Ida Kar in 1961. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London
On 27 March 1956, Penelope Mortimer, a 37-year-old novelist and mother of six, took up her pen at home in Swiss Cottage, north London, and opened her diary. “Perhaps soon I shall begin to write another book,” she scribbled. “But there’s no real confidence. I’m frightened of being smart, of not feeling sufficiently, of not being – do I mean sincere? I don’t know. I sit in the chair and smoke and think, I can’t sit here much longer; and go on sitting. I drive to John Barnes [a nearby department store] and walk around the bales of material, even sometimes feeling it, touching it; thinking, I know quite well I don’t want to, shan’t buy any… Some day I shall write about this.” According to Valerie Grove, the biographer of Mortimer’s second husband, John Mortimer, later she returned to this entry and annotated it with two words: Pumpkin Eater.
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