Product Description The Paper Garden is unlike anything else you have ever read. At once a biography of an extraordinary 18th century gentlewoman and a meditation on late-life creativity, it is a beautifully written tour de force from an acclaimed poet. Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-1788) was the witty, beautiful and talented daughter of a minor branch of a powerful family. Married off at 16 to a 61-year-old drunken squire to improve the family fortunes, she was widowed by 25, and henceforth had a small stipend and a horror of a marriage. She spurned many suitors over the next twenty years, including the powerful Lord Baltimore and the charismatic radical John Wesley. She cultivated a wide circle of friends, including Handel and Jonathan Swift. And she painted, she stitched, she observed, as she swirled in the outskirts of the Georgian court. In mid-life she found love, and married. Upon her husband's death 23 years later, she arose from her grief, picked up a pair of scissors and, at the age of 72, created a new art form, mixed-media collage. Over the next decade, Mrs Delany created an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the Botanica Delanica.Delicately, Peacock has woven parallels in her own life around the story of Mrs Delany's and, in doing so, has made this biography into a profound and beautiful examination of the nature of creativity and art.Gorgeously designed and featuring 35 full-colour illustrations, this is a sumptuous and lively book full of fashion and friendships, gossip and politics, letters and love. It's to be devoured as voraciously as one of the court dinners it describes. Quill & Quire This wonderful and markedly unusual work by Toronto poet Molly Peacock is both biography and memoir, but not the sort that switches back and forth between genres. The biographical element concerns Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-88), an acquaintance of such diverse figures as Jonathan Swift, John Wesley, and George Frederic Handel. On the surface, at least, the life of a widowed 18th-century Anglo-Irish gentlewoman couldn’t be more different from the author’s. Peacock (born in 1947) grew up in a working-class household “dominated by a violent, alcoholic father [and] lived in fear of something happening that would prevent [her] from getting out of Buffalo.”As she neared 40, Peacock learned of Delany’s most singular accomplishment: how, at 72, she “entered a mesmerized state induced by close observation” and developed a new art form, a kind of proto-collage. With scissors and paste, Delany created nearly a thousand incredibly intricate (and botanically accurate) three-dimensional flowers, to which she sometimes added paint or dried leaves, thus becoming, so to speak, the mother of mixed-media.Delany’s art, now in the British Museum, launched Peacock on a decades-long journey of enlightenment and obsession, as she tried to comprehend how creativity can strike without warning at such an advanced age, and what that may tell us about gender, empowerment, the craft that lies beneath art and literature, and “the floral metaphor as a way of life.”The gist of Peacock’s discoveries could be paraphrased this way: we are all prisoners of biology, and biology doesn’t simply erode as the body withers. “The flowers are portraits of the possibilities of age,” Peacock writes. “They are aged. They can be portraits of sexual intensity - but softened. Softer, and drier, as our sexuality becomes. Yet they also can be simple botany, nearly accurate representations of specimens. They all come out of darkness, intense and vaginal.”This is a unique book, one even more remarkable than Mrs. Delany herself. Review “The volume itself is a craft object, sumptuously presented and designed, on fine paper, with colophons and decorations, and full-page colour reproductions. . . . The Paper Garden will be everyone’s favourite Christmas p
