Reading - The Pumpkin Eater

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer



The narrator of this story is married to her fourth and excessively well-paid husband. This income only serves to highlight the emptiness of a life led by a woman deprived of the domestic trappings that have defined her. Without an existence centred around the kitchen, the shops, the children's nursery, the narrator's world is displaced and stripped of all direction. All that is left is a capacity for driven love, for pregnancy, and for seeing straight through the facade of the world of the modern middle-class.