Book Review-The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 by Molly Peacock & Link Up On the Edge #271

November 19, 2021 / 36 Comments

Last month, one of the Style Imitating Art prompts not only inspired my outfit but also prompted me to purchase further reading material about the featured artist. Salazar of 14 Shades of Grey had chosen the flower mosaiks created by Mrs. Mary Delany in the late 18th century. Mrs. Delany began her delicate work of mixed media collage (a brand new art form created by her) at the age of 72 after mourning the loss of her second husband. With declining eyesight and arthritic hands, she hand dyed her papers and then painstakingly cut and pasted tiny bits of colored paper onto pitch black backgrounds in the form of flowers. Over the next decade of her life into her 80’s, Mrs. Delany created 985 of these collages all accurately depicting the flora which they were meant to represent.

For a brief recounting of Mrs. Delany’s life, you can read the short biography that I shared in Style Imitating Art: Paper Mosaiks by Mary Delany. It was this truncated biography that compelled me to want to know more about this fascinating woman. Always forgetting that I can check books out of the library, I headed straight to Amazon to find the one book that was continually referenced in my research, The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 by Molly Peacock. Fifteen dollars and a few days later and I was tearing into this beautiful work of poetic splendor with a reading vigor that I haven’t felt in a long time. I actually finished all 360 pages in just a few weeks..which is fast reading for me these days!

Mary Delany
Portrait of Mary Granville Pendarves (later Delany) in gold box by Christian Friedrich Zincke, ca. 1740

The Paper Garden is the story of Mrs. Delany and her life’s work as told by internationally acclaimed poet Molly Peacock. Ms. Peacock delicately weaves her own biographical story into Mrs. Delany’s story as she tells how she first became acquainted with the artist’s work and the artist’s story. She shares the parallels in their lives that kept her going deeper into her research on the fascinating character of Mary Delany.

The book is written in 14 chapters with each one focusing on a particular flower mosaik. Ms. Peacock provides a detailed artistic analysis of each of the mosaiks that she shared in this work while also pointing out the parallels between Mrs. Delany’s life and her own. She also explains how each depicted flower so perfectly represents specific times and important moments in each woman’s life.

While the book is written in prose, Ms. Peacock’s poetic voice shines though in the most brilliant way as she examines the nature of creativity and art and how our lives can lead us to things we never imagined. The book contains 35 full color illustrations of Mrs. Delany’s flower mosaiks and a few portraits of the artist herself.

“Her passage through her early years was a negotiation between her unruliness and society’s tamings. The huge task for the little girl-largely an unconscious task-was to conjure up the trick of retaining a degree of her wildness, what we might think of as her true self, while learning the endless shades of social distinction and internalizing the endless rules of comportment.”

Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72

“To have what you have made so esteemed that it seems to be keeping a person alive, or comforts a person as he makes his transit to the next world, is to assign a magnitude to what you do that is so tremendous you must keep doing it.”

“The secret of marriage is thinking that your partner is better than yourself.”

“Not to know is also sometimes the position of the poet, who depends on close observation to magnify a subject, hoping to discover an animating spirit. There’s romance in that forensic impulse, because it yields surprise-an antidote to the jaded mind age has to fend against.”

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from the beautiful poetic way that is was written to the gorgeous images to the inspiring life of an 18th century woman who began her most important life’s work at the age of 72, a work that has endured some 250 years.

So if ever you are feeling too old to begin a new life’s mission, think of Mary Delany and then get to work on whatever drives your passions regardless of your age!

Painting of Mrs. Delany by John Opie, 1782

If anyone else is interested in reading this fascinating book, please let me know and I will gladly send it your way. I am on a mission to clean out all the junk in my house as I continue on my complete home makeover project so now as I finish reading new books, I am passing them on to the next interested person. I really should start using the library more often, but then I wouldn’t be able to pass on my book love so maybe this is a better way!

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I am a midlife woman, wife, and stay-at-home mother of 2 boys and 2 cats. I have a passion for helping other women feel fabulous in the midst of this crazy, beautiful life.

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