The Paper Garden:
Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work At 72 Molly Peacock
A beautifully written tour de force from an internationally acclaimed poet, The Paper Garden is at once a biography of an extraordinary eighteenth-century woman and a fascinating meditation on late-life creativity.
Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-1788) was the witty, beautiful, and talented daughter of a minor branch of a powerful family. Married off at seventeen to a sixty-one-year-old drunken squire to improve the family fortunes, then widowed by twenty-five, she would spurn many suitors over the next twenty years, including the charismatic Lord Baltimore, but she also refused to retire to a quiet, pensioned existence. 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 finally found love, and married again.
Upon her second husband's death twenty-three years later, she arose from her grief, picked up a pair of scissors and, at the age of seventy-two, 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 Flora Delanica. Delicately, Molly 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 thirty-five 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.
Book of The Year
Booklist | The Economist | The Globe and Mail
The Irish Times | The Kansas City Star | London Evening | Standard | Maclean's | The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
| The Sunday Telegraph
An excerpt from
The Paper Garden —
A Woman Becomes An Artist in her Eighth Decade
Imagine starting your life's work at seventy-two. At just that age, Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (May 14, 1700-April 15, 1788), a fan of George Frideric Handel, a sometime dinner partner of satirist Jonathan Swift, a wearer of green-hooped satin gowns, and a fiercely devoted subject of blond King George III, invented a precursor of what we know as collage. One afternoon in 1772 she noticed how a piece of colored paper matched the dropped petal of a geranium. After making that vital imaginative connection between paper and petal, she lifted the eighteenth-century equivalent of an X-Acto blade (she'd have called it a scalpel) or a pair of filigree-handled scissors — the kind that must have had a nose so sharp and delicate that you could almost imagine it picking up a scent. With the instrument alive in her still rather smooth-skinned hand, she began to maneuver, carefully cutting the exact geranium petal shape from the scarlet paper.
Then she snipped out another.
And another, and another, with the trance-like efficiency of repetition — commencing the most remarkable work of her life: a series of almost a thousand cut paper botanical collages, each flower composed of hundreds of dots, squiggles, and moons of bright paper on dramatic black backgrounds. Each flower steps forth as onto a lit stage.
"Physically beautiful and emotionally transporting. . . Peacock makes her own mosaic by weaving pieces of her life into Delany's story, and ties it all together with lovely meditations on art, love, history and botany. The result is a sumptuous bounty of gorgeous words, striking mosaics and a spirit of joy - the joy of finding one's true calling."
- Chicago Tribune
What People Are Saying
“Delany's story abounds with energy as Peacock brings her alive . . . Like her glorious multilayered collages, Delany is so vivid a character she almost jumps from the page.”
— Andrea Wulf,
New York Times Book Review
“The ultimate late bloomer comes to lush life.”
— Vogue
“Affecting and engaging, Peacock's own candor combines with Delan'’s wit and honesty to prove that it is never too late to make a life for oneself and to be sustained by art. VERDICT: This marvelous 'mosaick' makes an indelible impression.”
— Library Journal, [Starred Review]
“Peacock writes Delany's life story with inspiring enthusiasm . . . But there is much more to The Paper Garden. Author Peacock blends various flowers along with those displayed in this remarkable work to phases in Delany's life . . . I would recommend this moving story to all readers because it is so spirited.”
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Possessed of a discerning eye, Peacock . . . lavishes attention on Mary's life, both social and artistic, drenching us in vivid, sensory language as if we were adrift in champagne. The Paper Garden is perfect for the art lover, and for the reader who revels in rich digressive layers that imitate the contours of our lives.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This lovely bio by a noted poet speaks to the creative impulse in all of us."
— Good Housekeeping
“[A] remarkable biography.”
— More
“A meditation on sexuality, friendship and creativity . . . The volume itself is a craft object, sumptuously presented and beautifully designed.”
— Victoria Glendinning,
Globe and Mail
“A winsomely unorthodox ode to Delany that is part biography, part miniature coffee-table book and part memoir . . . Peacock skillfully and tangibly evokes Delany's era . . . The point Peacock makes most convincingly is that Delany's rarefied oeuvre, and her late but metaphorically apt 'blooming,' was the perfect, logical product of the life that preceded it.”
— Toronto Star
“Captivating . . . The Paper Garden is a lovely book, clever, artfully contrived, wonderfully illustrated and full of surprises . . . fascinating and original. It is a book to be treasured.”
— London Free Press
“Wonderful and markedly unusual . . . A unique book, one even more remarkable than Mrs. Delany herself.”
— Quill & Quire
“Like flowers built of a millefeuille of paper, Ms. Peacock builds a life out of layers of metaphor. The result is . . . as strangely moving as the 'muddled blooms' of Mrs Delany's art.”
— Economist
“Elegantly written and handsomely illustrated . . . An unmitigated delight.”
— Financial Times
“Peacock's prose . . . is as pungent and precise as her subject's flowers. . . . The Paper Garden is a blessed relief from the humdrum, a bright feather in a peacock's tail.”
— Sydney Morning Herald
"A beautifully designed, eye-catching book . . . A celebration of second chances and the possibility - so attractive to those of a certain age - of an unexpected blossoming late in life.”
— Michael Dirda,
Washington Post
"Peacock does with words what Delany did with scissors and paper, consummately constructing an indelible portrait of a late-blooming artist, an exalted inquiry into creativity, and a resounding celebration of the 'power of amazement'."
— Booklist, [starred review]
“A beautifully produced book . . . There are many moments in The Paper Garden when it's clear that a poet is writing . . . Poems require original and sensory description under formal constraints, and Peacock gives us such as she writes about Delany's friendships, her elaborate handmade gowns, the larger-scale historical events that shaped the artist's life, and the care she lavished on the mosaics.”
— Art in America
“Peacock recounts with verve and empathy each chapter in Mary Delany's life, which was as intricate as one of her flowers and would on its own make for a scintillating biography. But the poet - who reveres Delany as a role model exemplifying a late-in-life artistic flowering - digs much deeper . . . It feels as though Peacock is channeling Delany's spirit in this vital, exquisitely crafted portrait, the piquant fruit of an artistic cross-pollination . . . Part biography, part memoir and a veritable prose poem, Peacock's luscious, witty and profound homage to Mary Delany assures us that a life, no matter how daunting, can be a seedbed for creativity and enlightenment when it is lived with curiosity, attentiveness, principles and generosity of spirit.”
— Kansas City Star
“I loved what this book had to say about art and passion and lives well spent.”
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Peacock fell in love with Delany during a chance visit to a museum, and she makes us fall for her, too, in this terrifically romantic portrait of the artist as a tenacious and patient dreamer.”
— Whole Living
“To scrupulous research [Molly Peacock] brings poetic sensibility and structures her narrative in a way that echoes the flowers themselves. The result is as innovative a piece of literary craftsmanship as her subject’s was artistic. . . . as I closed this beautifully designed book with its exquisite reproductions and sensuous paper, one word came to mind and has remained with me ever since: amazing.”
— Katharine Lochnan, Literary Review of Canada
“In the continuing debate about the future of print publications, [the publishers] 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.”
— The Novascotian
“[Peacock's] account of [Delany's] life, which is expanded into a meditation on friendship and creativity, is so fresh, sensitive and convincing . . . lovely.”
— Diana Athill, The Times
“Written with an eye for a button or a piece of lace, in a narrative joie de vivre, they are emotional and social outpourings with breezy opinions and the details of living that allow one to drink in the brewed quotidian existence of the eighteenth century.”
— Daily Telegraph
“A poetic meditation on one woman's experiences that offers up inspiration for others . . . moving and thought-provoking, demanding and entertaining.”
— Scotland on Sunday
“The Paper Garden is a profound and beautiful examination of the nature of creativity and art.”
— Channel: North Shore's Monthly Magazine
“Esteemed poet Peacock chronicles the remarkable, many-chaptered life of English artist Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-88) and marvels over her 'flower mosaiks,' entwining aspects of her own life with Delany's to evocative effect.”
— Booklist,
"Top 10 Arts Books: 2011"
“[The Paper Garden] is organized by flower - forget-me-not, thistle, poppy, etc., each a metaphor for a different phase in Delany's life. In this way, the book itself is a complicated, delicate and beautiful collage.”
— Los Angeles Times
“It's an incredible artistic achievement.”
— Donna Seaman
“A beautiful biography of a late-flowering life . . . Poet Molly Peacock lovingly channels her kindred spirit, Mary Delany, in this charming biography of the 18th-century botanical artist . . . Peacock seems to write in the same spirit that she sees in Mary Delany, a spirit that can glory in the details, and the resulting account is all the more heartfelt and moving for it.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
“An intriguing, evocative aesthetic experience. A lyrical, meditative rumination on art and the blossoming beauty of self that can be the gift of age and love.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Peacock's tribute is beautifully designed and makes for a gorgeous addition to any collection.”
— Image
"We call for the Oscar-worthy costume-drama version."
— Whole Living
“Like collage itself, The Paper Garden is carefully layered - part fascinating biography . . . part gripping memoir . . . accompanied by dozens of vivid photo reproductions. Beautifully written and rendered.”
— Maclean’s
“A fascinating, uplifting and beautiful book.”
— Montreal Gazette
“[A] rich and poetic hybrid biography . . . Teeming with life - and gorgeous colour illustrations.”
— Winnipeg Free Press
“The book I coveted most this year was the exquisite The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock, who manages to imbue 18th-century decoupage flowers with surprisingly radical significance.”
— London Evening Standard, "Best Books of the Year"
“Vivid . . . The Paper Garden is, like its subject, difficult to classify. Molly Peacock's writing has many different registers - part essay, fan letter, biography and autobiography. Peacock borrows the techniques of her subject, in the sense that her form of life writing relies on an instinctive process of layering, arrangement and juxtaposing.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“Fascinating . . . A literary treat and a visual delight, but it is also a great book with much to say about life and how to live it . . . a wonderful read about what really matters.”
— Gardens Illustrated
“The Paper Garden is a total delight. From beginning to end, from gorgeous cover to gorgeous cover, it is a joy to read. . . . The Paper Garden is simply a beautiful book, in every way. A perfect gift to yourself, or others.”