Penelope Mortimer
20th September 11
“But finally she was resilient; she didn’t go the way of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. She continued to write, came to New York to teach, and made it through to the age of 81, living on her own in a cottage in the Cotswolds, where she had become an avid gardener. ‘Owning land,’ she wrote at the close of her second memoir, which ends in 1978 (although it was only published in 1993), ‘made some stubbornly preserved part of me emerge rampant, sweeping the rest out of sight.’”
—Daphne Merkin, from her introduction to Mortimer’s novel, The Pumpkin Eater
