Penelope Ruth Mortimer (née Fletcher; 19 September 1918 – 19 October 1999) was a Welsh-born English journalist, biographer, and novelist.

Her father had lost his faith and used the parish magazine to celebrate Soviet persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church.

[4] Mortimer later wrote of her father, "I think he was a clergyman for one reason only; there was nothing else – as Nellie Fletcher's second son – he could possibly have been!

As a small boy, bullied and teased by six sisters and four brothers, he sat under the nursery table chanting 'Mama, papa, all the children are disagreeable except me', to the tune of Gentle Jesus'.

[5] She met the barrister and writer John Mortimer while pregnant with the last child and married him on 27 August 1949, the day that her divorce from Dimont became absolute.

[5] Mortimer wrote more than a dozen novels during her career, most of them focusing on upper middle-class life in British society.

Her former agent Giles Gordon, in his obituary of her in The Guardian, called it "the most astute biography of a royal since Lytton Strachey was at work.

Penelope had approached her subject as somebody in the public eye, whose career might as well be recorded as if she were a normal human being.