Letter & Postcard Written while Promoting: About Time: An Aspect of Autobiography

Written by the novelist Penelope Mortimer to the Yorkshire art collector Ronnie Duncan, a letter and postcard from June and August 1979. The postcard (featuring a Duchamp image) looks ahead from June to ‘My spell at Hebden [Bridge]... It sees far in the future, but the distant Commitments have a habit of quite suddenly being tomorrow - which I find very unnerving...’ The letter which was written from Gloucestershire cancels her planned visit to Duncan and his wife as ‘I have to go to New York... Perhaps if they ever let one loose [her publisher] (doubtful, I think, from the schedule) I could come over....’ Both items are signed ‘Penelope M’.

Mortimer (1918-1999) wrote a dozen novels and was famously married to the novelist John Mortimer from whom she was divorced in 1971.