One of this summer’s hottest reads is, in fact, almost 50 years old — a feminist cult classic that has spent much of its life gathering dust on the shelves of secondhand bookshops (where it was rediscovered by a marketing manager at Faber).
But at a time where online tradwives are peddling themselves as the remedy to 21st-century burnout, this Walden-meets-The Feminine Mystique tale feels like a newly relevant and enduringly subversive clarion call.
Gaining Ground, originally published in 1980 and reissued this month, is the first novel by Booker-longlisted Canadian author and journalist Joan Barfoot.
It is the story of Abra, a young woman who has left her husband and two children in Toronto to live self-sufficiently in a remote cabin in the woods.
There are no clocks or mirrors. Abra hacks off her own hair and registers changes in her appearance by the ageing of her hands, the muscling of her arms.
She wakes with the dawn, eats when she is hungry and spends her days gardening and labouring, drawing and writing, or simply observing the world around her.
She hibernates during winter, eating from her stores of food grown and preserved in summer. Luckily, she has electricity, running hot water and $30,000 to draw on.
But this harmonious, simple life is ruptured after nine years by the appearance at the cabin of her daughter Kate, now 18.
Memories of her past life, of stifling motherhood and wifedom, keeping up appearances at dinners with colleagues of her stockbroker husband Stephen, caring for and worrying about her children, and gradually breaking down under the weight of social expectation and lost identity start to resurface and unsettle Abra’s peace.
Cosy and unsettling
The book’s register swings between cosy and unsettling with aplomb.
Abra’s descriptions of setting up her life in the cabin, sanding and oiling her furniture, making shopping lists, adding slapdash but pleasing wallpaper and curtains, laying out and planting her garden and generally learning how to order her days to survive alone are deeply pleasurable to read.
Tougher is Abra’s heart-in-mouth plotting of her escape from her family, which I found myself simultaneously willing to succeed and to fail.
I cheered her on to escape late-1970s Toronto where, as a woman, a bank or lawyer could insist on getting her husband’s approval for how she spends her own inherited money.
Yet I was utterly floored when she kisses her children and sends them off to school, knowing it is the last time she will see them — the stuff of parental worst nightmares.
This is not a comfortable, moral tale with clear-cut heroes and villains and a straightforward message. Abra is not necessarily likeable or relatable but I found it impossible not to admire her honesty.
She is wealthy, her husband is kind, her children are healthy, bright and loving — she has a life many people can only dream of.
And yet she is willing to blast the dream apart if it means getting closer to some kind of truth.
I found some passages where Abra describes her feelings and sensations a little vague and repetitive. But several piercing scenes cut through.
In one, she saves a dying squirrel, mends its broken leg, starts to enjoy the “false comfort” of being depended on and forces herself to send it back into nature. “It was not right, twisting the nature of something, making it less free… It is necessary to let things be,” she says.
Similarly, her daughter Kate shows an aptitude for dancing and music so Abra and Stephen pay for lessons with one eye on a future career. “We saw her enjoyment fading, her movements becoming more stylised and conscious, and knew we were ruining it for her.”
In our era of abundant motherhood vs freedom lit, Gaining Ground’s reputation as a feminist work is likely to be burnished further.
But focusing on the lens misses the book’s more universal concerns — how to live with integrity and meaning, the ambivalence of personal freedom, its seductive appeal and the great responsibility, pain and honesty it demands.
Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot is out now (Faber, £9.99)
