The Pumpkin Eater

by Penelope Mortimer

This Thursday was the birthday of Penelope Mortimer, who died twenty-five years ago next month. I can highly recommend reading her novel The Pumpkin Eater, first published in 1962. Mortimer said that she put into this book ‘practically everything I can say about men and women and their relationship to one another’.

Penelope Mortimer (1918-1999)

Penelope Fletcher was born in North Wales, the daughter of an abusive clergyman who had lost his faith. She had two children by her first husband, Charles Dimont, two children by her second husband, the barrister and novelist John Mortimer, and two through extramarital affairs. She wrote psychologically fraught novels about broken marriages, child-bearing and nightmarish domesticity.

Penguin Modern Classics | 160 pages

The Pumpkin Eater opens with Mrs Armitage having a breakdown in the linen section of Harrods department store, staining the ‘stiff cloths with extraordinarily large tears’. Over the course of the narrative, told through letters, Jo Armitage feels increasingly and unsettlingly trapped by her marriage and her family. ‘Every woman I can think of will want to read this book,’ said Edna O’Brien.

Mortimer published her semi-autobiographical novel in the same year that she agreed – at her husband John’s urging – to have an abortion and sterilisation, only to discover that John was having an affair with the actor Wendy Craig, by whom he had a son. She ‘peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy,’ writes Nick Hornby, ‘so that what we’re asked to look at is frequently red-raw’.

The Pumpkin Eater (1964), dir. Jack Clayton

Harold Pinter wrote a Bafta award-winning screenplay for the 1964 film adaptation, directed by Jack Clayton and starring Peter Finch, James Mason and Anne Bancroft, who won Best Actress at Cannes.

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Mortimer took her title from the sinister old nursery rhyme:

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater,
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.

Here is a rather literal illustration from A Second Ladybird Book of Nursery Rhymes, published in 1966, four years after Mortimer’s novel.

from A Second Ladybird Book of Nursery Rhymes (1966), ill. Frank Hampson

The familiar version of the rhyme dates from the late eighteenth-century. A possibly older Scottish variant is even darker. Peter immures his errant wife in the wall and leaves her to be eaten by mice.

Peter, my neeper,
Had a wife,
And he couldna’ keep her,
He pat her i’ the wa’,
And lat a’ the mice eat her.

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