by Molly Peacock ~ McClelland & Stewart~ Review: Halifax Herald, February 2011
Mary Granville Pendarves Delany was born into a minor branch of an important British family at the turn of the eighteenth century. At the tender age of 17, this vivacious young woman was married off to a boorish drunkard old enough to be her grandfather, to improve the family fortunes. She was widowed after seven difficult years. She married again twenty years later, a union which afforded her much contentment and happiness, but it wasn’t until after the death of her second husband that Mrs Delany picked up scissors and paints and invented a medium now known as mixed-media collage. She was 72.
Over the next ten years, Mrs Delany worked tirelessly at her art, creating botanically correct cut-paper flowers, precisely accurate in both detail and colour. These exquisite reproductions are often hard to recognize as paper and paint. In all, she produced 985 flowers, and it was her failing eyesight that finally stopped her. The collection, known as Flora Delanica, is housed in the British Museum.
In The Paper Garden, Molly Peacock focuses on eleven of these extraordinary pieces of art, weaving through the narrative snippets of her own life as it parallels that of Mrs Delany’s. Her language is both visual and poetic, with an attention to detail that takes her readers into the heart of court life in eighteenth century England.
In the continuing debate about the future of print publications, McClelland & Stewart have triumphed. An electronic version of The Paper Garden would be a mere shadow, only hinting at the pleasure readers will get from this miniature art book. The silken pages, the writing, the careful stitching, the wonderful reproductions, the subtle perfume of new ink, the size (it tucks perfectly in the corner of a bag) – these all combine to a whole that is a pleasure to hold and to read. M & S and Molly Peacock have done Mrs Delany proud, and she would surely have been delighted.
Molly Peacock is a poet, essayist and author. She was one of the creators of New York's Poetry in Motion program and is the Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. A transplanted New Yorker, she lives in Toronto.
