Re-Covered: Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, the 1960 short-story collection by British writer Penelope Mortimer, carries a note of gratitude to the editor of The New Yorker, “in whose columns the majority of these stories first appeared.” Three years earlier, Mortimer had signed a contract with the magazine for six stories a year, after which she provided them with what she describes as a “steady stream” of pieces drawn from her day-to-day experience. “There was no need to look for ideas,” she explains in (1993), her second volume of memoirs. “I mined my life for incidents with a beginning, a middle and an end, finding even the dreariest days contained nuggets of irony, farce, unpredictable behaviour.” Mortimer—who, by the time she died, at the age of eighty-one in 1999, had published nine novels, one short-story collection, two volumes of memoir, a biography of the Queen Mother, screenplays, and an abundant body of journalism—drew more heavily on her lived experience than most, not least because it proved such a reliable source of creative stimulus. “None of the stories could accurately be described as fiction,” she goes on to confess in ; “the moment I fabricated or attempted to get away from direct experience regretfully turned it down.”