Daddy's Gone A-Hunting
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A breakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion—“her style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel” (Rachel Cooke, The Observer)
Bourgeois housewife Ruth Whiting is “paralysed by triviality,” measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge 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. Then Angela accidentally falls pregnant, and Ruth must keep her own past from repeating itself.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English writer Mortimer (The Pumpkin Eater) offers a simmering portrait of suburban malaise, originally published in 1958. With the children away at school, Ruth Whiting, 37, feels stifled by her domineering husband, Rex, and the prattle of the neighbors in their satellite town outside London. She's painfully aware of the standards expected of society wives, and struggles to conform. To make matters worse, Rex has installed the prying "wardess" Miss de Beer to keep tabs on and take care of Ruth, whose anxiety makes life feel like "a state of perpetual danger." All this comes to a head when her oldest daughter, Angela, 18, gets pregnant while visiting home from Oxford. Under the oblivious eye of Miss de Beer, Ruth tries to arrange an abortion, by no means an easy thing in an era when they were illegal and scandalous. The ensuing drama is a harrowing journey into Ruth's increasingly desperate psyche, as she both envies Angela her freedom and dearly hopes to help her avert the same fate that befell her—a prisoner of marriage seldom at home even in her own house. 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.