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Why Is Joan Barfoot’s First Novel Catching Fire Fifty Years Later?

The cult classic about a woman who deserts her family is more relevant than ever

The afterlife of a book can follow unpredictable paths. It might vanish from publishers’ lists to be kept on life support by a small but stubborn republic of readers. Such was the case with Joan Barfoot’s remarkable novel Gaining Ground, about a woman named Abra who leaves her husband and two young children to live, more or less self-sufficiently, on a wooded acreage northwest of Toronto. First published in Canada in 1978 as Abra by McGraw-Hill Ryerson, it appeared in Britain two years later under the more evocative title Gaining Ground. For decades, it circulated largely by recommendation, passed from one devoted reader to another until it gradually assumed the status of a cult classic.

It has recently been returned to print by the British publisher Faber & Faber. Its resurrection began on a dusty shelf in a second-hand bookshop in Peckham, London, where Rachel Darling, a marketeer at Faber, happened upon a copy of the original UK edition. She took it home, read it, and was captivated. Having not published a novel since 2009, and effectively retired, Barfoot was astonished when the publisher told her they wanted to bring Gaining Ground back into print. As luck would have it, the rights to Barfoot’s novels had reverted to her.

After Faber announced the new edition, Barfoot fans “came out of the woodwork,” Ella Griffiths, head of classics and heritage at Faber, told me, 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 resulting chorus of admiration—the dust jacket features plaudits from the likes of Claire Kilroy, Sarah Moss, Max Porter, Samantha Harvey, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa—has helped give Gaining Ground an improbable second life. Faber has sold translation rights in fifteen territories, and the novel has attracted big- and small-screen interest.

The literature of solitude is rather crowded. It’s one of our oldest subjects, maybe because being alone is never merely a physical condition but a way of apprehending the world. Writers have approached it as enforced isolation (Robinson Crusoe, The Wall), chosen withdrawal (Walden), spiritual retreat (Siddhartha), or social exile (The Stranger).

You might think you know where this is going: that shopworn feminist narrative about a woman escaping the suffocations of marriage and domesticity, the cookie-cutter banality of suburban existence. But Barfoot has written something odder and more radical. Abra doesn’t leave her family 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. It’s less about escape than gravitation. When Abra comes across an inconspicuous ad in the newspaper for a “winterized cabin on seventy acres,” she’s drawn to it as if to a visiting spaceship in a sci-fi movie.

Abra’s husband, Stephen, offers no obvious reason to flee. He is endlessly solicitous about her happiness, his stockbroker income fat enough that they can live without financial worries in a large house. Though Abra doesn’t need to work, Stephen encourages her to follow her passions. Go to school, find a job that interests her. Instead, she spends her days smoking and reading the newspaper cover to cover.

The woman who leaves her children is, in life as in literature, seen as a........

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