Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

by Penelope Mortimer

Overview

A peakthrough 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 pidge 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946022264
Publisher:	McNally Editions
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Series:	McNally Editions
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

Plangent, excoriating . . . While the novels of some of her still-celebrated male contemporaries (Kingsley Amis, say) have come to seem somewhat bombastic and dated, Mortimer’s style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel.”

—Rachel Cooke, The Observer

“Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, now being reissued in the U.S., was published several years before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. But the novel . . . appears to anticipate what Friedan proposed as ‘the problem that has no name’—the profound unhappiness of a generation of educated women trapped in the domestic sphere with no way out . . . One of the most compelling arguments for freedom of reproductive choice that I’ve ever encountered.”

—Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic

“Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy.”

—Nick Hornby, The Believer

“Originally published in 1958, a full decade before abortion was legalized in the U.K., the book is as salient a study of the disparate views and persistent inequities around reproductive health care for present-day U.S. readers as it is illuminating of midcentury English attitudes and conditions. A wry dissection of domestic despair and affluent ennui and a topical introduction to Mortimer's body of literary work."

—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“[A] searing portrait of the turmoil that ensues when a middle-aged wife and mother is forced to reckon with her young adult daughter’s coming of age.”

—Lucy Scholes, Financial Times

“A simmering portrait of suburban malaise, originally published in 1958 . . . Mortimer (1918–1999) avoids easy answers in her nuanced take on the life of a woman who is quietly compromised. This easily earns a place on the shelf of noteworthy early feminist literature.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Better dialogue, more deftly characterized individuals or a prose style more precise and firm is not often encountered in modern fiction. Mortimer is impressively expert.”

—Orville Prescott, The New York Times

“A clinical dissection of life among the well-heeled . . . Unlike most satirists, Mortimer, for all her ruthlessness, never gets ice in the heart. Her victims never degenerate into abstract Aunt Sallies: to the bitter end they remain live, suffering individuals . . . Mortimer is a moralist who attains her ends without preaching a sermon: and that, I suspect, is one definition of a good novelist. With brilliant formal economy, sharp characterisation, and a few neatly ironic symbols, she diagnoses our modern spiritual malaise in terms of the individual. It is a remarkable and deeply disturbing achievement.”

—Peter Green, The Daily Telegraph

“Mrs. Mortimer’s characters seem like people who, having beaten their wings against the gilded cage of the woman’s magazine story, have escaped into the outside world, to the mountains and deserts of suffering and love . . . a place and a life which are repellent, dreary and sad almost beyond belief, but which their creator, with tender hatred and ironical compassion, brings to vivid, appalling life.”

—J. D. Scott, Sunday Times

From the Publisher

Plangent, excoriating . . . While the novels of some of her still-celebrated male contemporaries (Kingsley Amis, say) have come to seem somewhat bombastic and dated, Mortimer’s style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel.

The Observer - Rachel Cooke

Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, now being reissued in the U.S., was published several years before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. But the novel . . . appears to anticipate what Friedan proposed as ‘the problem that has no name’—the profound unhappiness of a generation of educated women trapped in the domestic sphere with no way out . . . One of the most compelling arguments for freedom of reproductive choice that I’ve ever encountered."

The Atlantic - Sophie Gilbert

A clinical dissection of life among the well-heeled . . . Layer after layer, the social fabric is stripped, to reveal the pitiable spiritual nullity it conceals . . . Unlike most satirists, Mrs. Mortimer, for all her ruthlessness, never gets ice in the heart. Her victims never degenerate into abstract Aunt Sallies: to the bitter end they remain live, suffering individuals . . . Mrs. Mortimer is a moralist who attains her ends without preaching a sermon: and that, I suspect, is one definition of a good novelist. With brilliant formal economy, sharp characterisation, and a few neatly ironic symbols, she diagnoses our modern spiritual malaise in terms of the individual. It is a remarkable and deeply disturbing achievement.

Daily Telegraph - Peter Green

Better dialogue, more deftly characterized individuals or a prose style more precise and firm is not often encountered in modern fiction. Mrs. Mortimer is impressively expert.

New York Times - Orville Prescott

Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy.

The Believer - Nick Hornby

★ 2022-06-22
In a commuter town outside of London, Ruth Whiting leads a lonesome and tedious existence.

With her sons returned to boarding school after the holidays, her daughter, Angela, to Cambridge, and her oblivious, bloviating husband absented to London during the workweek, Ruth, whether in fact or function, is almost always alone. When she socializes, it is, briefly and superficially, with equally bored bourgeois neighbors, other wives who, "like little icebergs, each keeps a bright and shining face above water; below the surface, submerged in fathoms of leisure, each keeps her own isolated personality....Their friendships, appearing frank and sunny, are febrile and short-lived, turning quickly to malice." And so, purposeless, neglected until someone needs something from her, unable to make or sustain meaningful connections even within her own family, revisiting past regrets that now make up the fundamental architecture of her life, Ruth finds her sense of self and security destabilizing. No longer trusted to remain independent, she is further isolated, attended by the family physician, who has bafflingly prescribed a trip alone to Antibes, wardened by the patronizing, priggish Miss de Beer. But when Angela comes to her for help with an unwanted pregnancy, retreading a younger Ruth's own missteps, a chance at real closeness may finally have arrived. The profound gap between what goes unsaid—which is often volumes—and what the characters say—typically the most minimal, noncommittal response available—drives Mortimer's bone-dry humor, illuminating the Whitings' vulnerable humanity and further alienation as they fumble for intimacy with one another and those in their orbit. Originally published in 1958, a full decade before abortion was legalized in the U.K., the book is as salient a study of the disparate views and persistent inequities around reproductive health care for present-day U.S. readers as it is illuminating of midcentury English attitudes and conditions.

A wry dissection of domestic despair and affluent ennui and a topical introduction to Mortimer's body of literary work.

Kirkus Reviews