Joan Barfoot's 1978 novel 'Gaining Ground' finds improbable second life
The 1978 Canadian novel, out of print for years, has been reissued and sold translation rights in 15 territories.
A novel by Canadian author Joan Barfoot, out of print for decades, has been revived by a British publisher and is attracting international interest.
Barfoot's novel, first published in Canada in 1978 as Abra, was found on a dusty shelf in a second-hand bookshop in Peckham, London, by Rachel Darling, a marketeer at Faber & Faber.
Darling took it home, read it, and was captivated.
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Faber & Faber told Barfoot they wanted to bring the book, which appeared in Britain in 1980 under the title Gaining Ground, back into print.
"After Faber announced the new edition, Barfoot fans 'came out of the woodwork,'" Ella Griffiths, head of classics and heritage at Faber, told The Walrus, saying they had read the book decades earlier and that it had changed their lives.
Younger writers encountering it for the first time responded with equal fervour.
The publisher has sold translation rights in fifteen territories, and the novel has attracted interest from film and television.
Barfoot, who had not published a novel since 2009 and was effectively retired, was astonished by the publisher's approach.
The rights to her novels had reverted to her.
The book tells the story of a woman named Abra who leaves her husband and two young children to live a self-sufficient life on a wooded acreage northwest of Toronto.
Barfoot has written something odder and more radical than a typical escape narrative, The Walrus reported.
Abra doesn't leave with the intention of beginning another life, or in pursuit of freedom, but under the pressure of an impulse that the novel refuses to explain.
Her husband, Stephen, offers no obvious reason to flee.
He is endlessly solicitous about her happiness, and his stockbroker income is enough that they can live without financial worries.
Abra's departure is made more unsettling by the fact that motherhood had once consumed her.
Years later, the mother who couldn't bear to let her child out of her sight becomes capable of leaving him altogether.
Such stories usually turn on the question of whether a woman should leave.
Gaining Ground pushes past that question to ask what becomes of a self when almost every relationship and responsibility has fallen away.
Abra pares human contact to the minimum.
She learns that a family had tried to live off the land in the cabin, nearly starved, and ended with the husband killing his wife and daughter before shooting himself.
Abra is unfazed.
In the novel's first pages, Abra's eighteen-year-old daughter, Katie, appears in her driveway.
Abra not only fails to recognize her, she refuses the continuity between the skinny nine-year-old she remembers and the young woman standing before her.
With her daughter standing before her, Abra's mind keeps drifting back to her garden.
Even after she has accepted who Katie is, Abra continues to deny her, referring to her as "this person" who "has no right."
Katie's anguish at having been abandoned is met with appalling coldness.
"She has taken it all personally," thinks Abra, "and it wasn't personal at all."
Katie has come looking for answers.
She responds with the patient caution of someone approaching an injured wild animal.
By degrees, Abra allows her daughter into her life.