DADDY’S GONE A-HUNTING by Penelope Mortimer

“A teenage Renaissance bride discovers that her husband of scarcely a year intends to murder her.”

the marriage portrait

DADDY’S GONE A-HUNTING

Mortimer, Penelope McNally Editions (264 pp.) $18.00 | May 17, 2022 978-1-946022-26-4

In a commuter town outside of London, Ruth Whiting leads a lonesome and tedious existence. With her sons returned to boarding school after the holidays, her daughter, Angela, to Cambridge, and her oblivious, bloviating husband absented to London during the workweek, Ruth, whether in fact or function, is almost always alone. When she socializes, it is, briefly and superficially, with equally bored bourgeois neighbors, other wives who, “like little icebergs, each keeps a bright and shining face above water; below the surface, submerged in fathoms of leisure, each keeps her own isolated personality....Their friendships, appearing frank and sunny, are febrile and short-lived, turning quickly to malice.” And so, purposeless, neglected until someone needs something from her, unable to make or sustain meaningful connections even within her own family, revisiting past regrets that now make up the fundamental architecture of her life, Ruth finds her sense of self and security destabilizing. No longer trusted to remain independent, she is further isolated, attended by the family physician, who has bafflingly prescribed a trip alone to Antibes, wardened by the patronizing, priggish Miss de Beer. But when Angela comes to her for help with an unwanted pregnancy, retreading a younger Ruth’s own missteps, a chance at real closeness may finally have arrived. The profound gap between what goes unsaid—which is often volumes—and what the characters say— typically the most minimal, noncommittal response available— drives Mortimer’s bone-dry humor, illuminating the Whitings’ vulnerable humanity and further alienation as they fumble for intimacy with one another and those in their orbit. Originally published in 1958, a full decade before abortion was legalized in the U.K., the book is as salient a study of the disparate views and persistent inequities around reproductive health care for present-day U.S. readers as it is illuminating of midcentury English attitudes and conditions.

A wry dissection of domestic despair and affluent ennui and a topical introduction to Mortimer’s body of literary work.

ITHACA

North, Claire Redhook/Orbit (464 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-316-42296-3

The queen of the gods narrates a crackling tale of secrets and intrigue.

Penelope has a problem—a few, in fact. First, there are the suitors: about a hundred men who trespass on her hospitality, waiting for her to admit that her husband, Odysseus, is dead and choose a new king of Ithaca. And then there are the pirates who’ve been harrying the coast, the fact that Ithaca has no men of fighting age to defend it, and the troubling possibility that one of the suitors has sent the pirates to pressure her into capitulating. Perhaps her biggest problem—or opportunity—is that she’s a woman, and even as a queen she’s expected to stay out of matters of state. As told by Hera, queen of the gods, Penelope’s story is one of secrets, of women working in the shadows, unnoticed and underestimated. As Penelope herself puts it, “The greatest power we women can own, is that we take in secret.” Hera is an appealingly involved narrator with a biting tongue (“Every little twerp is descended from Heracles these days”). She picks favorites, she complains, she nudges, she rails against her own reduced position among the gods. And she weaves a great yarn. More straightforward and more visceral than much of North’s recent work, this is a ground-up view of Greek myth populated by spying maids, crafty merchants, and conniving queens. It’s taut, suspenseful, and full of Hera’s delightfully dyspeptic attitude.

A thoroughly enjoyable exploration of Penelope’s side of the ancient story.

THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT

O’Farrell, Maggie Knopf (352 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-593-32062-4

A teenage Renaissance bride discovers that her husband of scarcely a year intends to murder her. Following up her National Book Critics Circle Award winner Hamnet (2020), inspired by the life of Shakespeare’s wife, O’Farrell turns to another woman seen by history only in glimpses. Little is known about Lucrezia de’Medici, married at 15 to the Duke of Ferrara, besides her suspicious death; rumors that she was poisoned prompted Robert Browning’s famous poem “My Last Duchess.” In contrast to Browning’s ever smiling victim, O’Farrell imagines a rebellious spirit less interested in matrimony than in painting the natural world around her. The author develops tension with a split time frame, opening in 1561 in “a wild and lonely place” to which 16-yearold Lucrezia is quite sure Alfonso has brought her to be killed, then circling back to depict her childhood in Florence, including a life-changing encounter with a tiger in her father’s private menagerie. From there the two narratives move forward in tandem: We see Lucrezia growing up to be sacrificed to political maneuvering that mandates her marriage to the suave Alfonso and growing aware in Ferrara that her outwardly courteous and kind husband is brutally determined to cement his shaky hold on the dukedom and ferociously intent on making sure she produces an heir. Her only solace comes in painting wild scenes of imaginary creatures, then covering them up with conventional still lifes approved by Alfonso as proper diversions for his