About book Paper Garden: Mrs Delany Begins Her Life's Work At 72 (2012)
Really 2.5 stars. ‘Tis a dangerous thing for an author to weave their own stories into a biography. Trying to draw parallels between a 20th century middle class poet in a stable marriage with a 1700s gentrified, twice married woman who comes up with her own genre of art in her 70s. For me, it reeked more of fascination and fandom in which the reader is expected to agree with opinion and conjecture, than of a well-studied biography. I felt the book would have been better served with a long introduction or epilogue by the author.Apparently there is a wealth of primary sources on Mary Granville Pendarves Delaney and much has been written on her. Unfortunately, I’m unaware of it. She most certainly is a fascinating subject. Born in 1700, married of to a corpulent 60-yr-old man when she was in her late teens, widowed, remarried in her forties, widowed again and then in her 70s she became an artist. Not to say she wasn’t educated in the arts and exposed to a wide array of gardens which inspired her late work. But it was then she snipped away and created nearly 1000 intricate and realistic flower collages on black paper. (Google her. Cool, huh!) Each chapter in this book is fronted by one of these works and the chapter attempts to tie it into her life. Sometimes this works better than others. Although I had lots of problems with the book, (including blatant factual errors) I’m still glad I read it for I may never get to another work on Mrs. Delaney and I will ooh and ahhh every time she’s mentioned. 3.5 stars - As a person who is more than a little obsessed with paper, I was intrigued by the subject of this book: Mary Delany, an eighteenth century woman from an aristocratic family who was the inventor of collage, creating almost a thousand botanical pictures from paper. She proved to be a fascinating person, with integrity, ambition and independence. She survived a horrible forced marriage with a much older man, defied convention and disapproving family in her widowhood by living on her own, and enjoyed a happy, loving marriage later in life.But it is the description of her great life work, the meticulous collages she began in her seventies, that is the centerpiece of the story. Ms. Peacock names the sections of this book after a number of those collages, and each segment begins with a description of that picture, before proceeding into each era of Mrs. Delany's life. My enjoyment of this well-written story of a fascinating woman was marred by two things: Ms. Peacock's uncomfortably graphic descriptions of her own highly sexual interpretations of each collage; and her insistence on inserting vignettes from her own life, stories which I found of considerably less interest than the tale she was supposed to be telling. (It turns out that she has identified herself so much with Mary Delany that she says -perhaps only facetiously- that she could be her reincarnation.) Beyond those annoying quirks, though, this is a book worth reading. Now I want to go to the British Museum and see the collages in person.
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Luscious prose, a mix of biography and autobiography.
—rocco
