reading from
The Lost Garden
Monday, 18 November, 7 pm
Faculty Staff Lounge
Ward Chipman Library Building
Helen Humphreys of Kingston, Ontario is the author of four books of poetry,
a novella, Ethel on Fire, and three novels. Anthem,
her most recent collection of poetry, won the Canadian Authors’
Association Award for Poetry. Published in seven countries, Humphreys’
novel Leaving Earth (1997) won the City of Toronto Book Award
and was chosen as Notable Book of the Year in 1998 by the New York
Times. Film rights for the novel have been optioned by Radclyffe
Productions of Britain. Humphreys’ second novel, the splendid Afterimage
(2000), tells the story of Irish housemaid Annie Phelan and her period
of employment with the pioneer photographer Isabelle Dashell (based on
Julia Margaret Cameron). Winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction
Prize, Afterimage was also named Notable Book of the Year by
the New York Times. In her elegantly understated and carefully
crafted third novel, The Lost Garden, Humphreys turns her attention
to the Women’s Land Army of the Second World War.
In
1941 Gwen Davis leaves her job at London’s Royal Horticultural Society
to take charge of seven women whose job it is to raise garden produce
on a vacated estate in Devonshire. Nearby, in the estate mansion, Canadian
soldiers await their embarkation orders. Solitary and friendless, Gwen
Davis is inexperienced in love and leadership: longing is the companion
of her days and nights. When she finds a hidden garden on the estate,
she tries to break the code written in the arrangement of the flowers
– "plants grouped by emotional categories," the work
of an anonymous gardener: "What they knew of longing was that it
sprang from the earth at odd moments, unplanned and unexpected, borne
on different carriers." The Lost Garden is a georgic of
praise for the garden that "dies and returns, dies and returns"
much as men and women experience longing and loss yet love again. Humphreys’
novel is a war story, a ghost story, and a homage to Virginia Woolf. Cryptic
and enigmatic, it may also be a love letter. Have someone read it to you.
"Shrewdly brief, The Lost Garden embraces the huge and fascinating philosophy of beauty and mourning with devotion and technical discernment."
– The Globe & Mail"No equivocation on this one. Kingston writer and poet Helen Humphreys’ [Afterimage] is in every way triumphant: written in perfect pitch by a writer whose heart is as open as her eyes."
– The Toronto Star