Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

by Penelope Mortimer

Overview

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, a 1958 novel by Penelope Mortimer, is about the expectations of women, about a house-bound mother reluctantly (desperately) at home all day, in contrast to her daughter who has escaped, to university and then, we can assume, to a job.

'The book came out at a time,' writes Valerie Grove in the Preface, 'when the impact of the new wave of feminism, which would change everything under the banner of women's liberation, had not yet arrived'. To put Daddy's Gone A-Hunting in context, it was first published five years before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and eight years before Hannah Gavron's The Captive Wife, and yet shares a number of similar themes. For example:

The relationships between the men are based on an understanding of success. Admiration is general, affection not uncommon. Even pity is known. The women have no such understanding. 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. Some are happy, some are poisoned with boredom; some drink too much and some, below the demarcation line, are slightly crazy; some love their husbands and some are dying from lack of love; a few have talent, as useless to them as a paralysed limb. Their friendships, appearing frank and sunny, are febrile and short-lived, turning quickly to malice. Combined, their energy could start a revolution.

In Ruth Whiting's commuter-belt village 'the wives conform to a certain standard of dress, they run their houses along the same lines, bring their children up in the same way; all prefer coffee to tea, all drive cars, play bridge, own at least one valuable piece of jewellery and are moderately good-looking.'  Yet Ruth is on the verge of going mad. A 'nervous breakdown' would be a politer phrase, but really she is being driven mad by her life and her madness is exacerbated by everyone's indifference to her plight:

Although Daddy's Gone A-Hunting is at times excruciatingly funny in its caustic dissection of the people among whom the Whitings live, it is also a profound study of female isolation. As the critic Judy Cooke has pointed out, Penelope Mortimer's novels were 'intense, imaginative explorations of an inner world. It is an enclosed world, dominated by fear, in which physical experiences such as sterilisation and abortion isolate her characters from their fellow beings and are metaphors for a deeper spiritual isolation.'

Endpaper

'Saraband' 1956, designed by R McGowan for Edinburgh Weavers

Product Details

BN ID:	2940181282063
Publisher:	Persephone Books
Publication date:	04/13/2025
Sold by:	Draft2Digital
Format:	eBook
File size:	699 KB

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