Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

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 i...