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The Paper Garden - Mrs. Delany {begins her Life= s Work} at 72 by Molly Peacock, McClelland & Stewart, hardcover, 397 pages, $32.99, ISBN 978-0-77107033-4

Just what was Mrs. Delany's work? Sometime ago I wrote a review about an art show at the Art Gallery of Ontario that featured 19^th century English women, who created photographic collages. There I wrote that my art studies informed me that collage is an early 20^th art form, the brainchild of such men as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Of course, this is nonsense. Collage has a very long history, but as we know it most recently in the West, it appeared that the 19^th century photo collage women re-introduced this art form to us. Suffice it say say, that is not so. It was our Mrs. Delany a whole century earlier who created it. Of course, she did not call her wonderful creations collages, or mixed media collages as referred to now. She called them floral mosaicks (sic), and in jest referred to them as Flora Delanica.

Peacock first encountered Mrs. Delany's work on September 27, 1986 at the Morgan Library in New York City. One hundred and 10 of these collages of close to 1,000 had come there from the British Museum. "Those flowers had the carefully crafted but mysterious quality of poems I most admired," Peacock writes about this encounter. "I went around the show twice, not methodically but flowing across the gallery from frame to frame. I could not get over the dexterity, the eyesight, and the fine muscle coordination that had produced them. I was hooked, I was sunk."

She admits that men like Braque and Picasso would have hated these highly realistic, botanically correct flowers because they were almost fuddy-duddy. "They were not shiny, abstract, or hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. They were not avant-garde, even in their own day." But, as we know, they were unusual, and their creation created a sensation in their time. Besides, looking at the reproductions in the book and reading about the manner in which Mrs. Delany went about to create her work, and the tools she fashioned—including making her own paste—shows once again that it is time that the art world stops viewing works by women as being mere craft while that of men is art.

Mary Granville came from a minor, impoverished, branch of an important British family. Born in 1700 at her father's country estate in Coulston, Wiltshire, she lived until 1788. To better his eldest daughter's prospects in life, Bernard Granville sent her to live with his much-loved sister, Lady Ann Stanley, in London. Mary stayed with her from age eight to 14. Aunt Stanley had been a Maid of Honor to Queen Mary, her sister Elizabeth held the same post with Queen Anne. Uncle Stanley (Sir John Stanley of Grange Gorman, Ireland) had been Secretary to the Lord Chamberlain to Queen Anne. Since the couple had no children, Mary's father knew his sister would educate his daughter in a manner that would make her an excellent marriage match. Besides, Aunt Stanley had great hopes that Mary might become a Maid of Honor to the Queen.

While still with her parents and living in Little Chelsea, then on the outskirts of London, Mary at age six attended classes at Mademoiselle Puelle's playschool where she not only began to learn French, but how to cut out silhouettes of birds and flowers. Thus she acquired a skill that would many decades later come to her aid when she embarked on her life-like, floral pieces. At eight, now living with the Stanleys in Whitehall, Mary learned to dance, to embroider, to read and speak French faultlessly, to play the spinet, perfect her seat on a horse. In other words, she became the epitome of a young lady, albeit one with a very strong self-will that would serve her well in the future.

Some of the elements that make The Paper Garden such a wonderful story is how Peacock entwines her own life into that of Mrs. Delany's. There are parallels in these women's lives, although the modern story has a different harrowing aspect and it lacks the tremendous moments of historical excitement in Mrs. Delany's life. But, to even attempt the parallel and make it work is a feat of not just the poet's imagination, but one of her verbal skills. Besides, her descriptions of not only the individual collages, and how many individual pieces it took to make them, but also the focused writing about the lifestyle of the 19^th century woman, what she wore and how she got dressed, how she had to behave and what made Delany so special, make this a book one does not put down lightly.

That is why not just the story of Mary Granville is the meat of this book, but the many full color plates of her floral mosaicks that accompany it. Publisher McClelland and Stewart invested considerable effort in this paperback-sized hardcover book consisting entirely of heavy, glossy white stock. Mrs. Delany created all of her work on a black background, which really makes the colors of the flowers stand out. Hence, the reproductions are masterworks of modern printing.

In 1708 Mary Delany met George Frideric Handel at her aunt and uncle's home. The 25-year-old composer sat down on Mary's own spinet to perform in the Stanleys' Whitehall apartments. He would become a life-long friend of Mary's, and she even drafted a libretto for him, though the work was never performed. Among the many other famous individuals she knew well were Jonathan Swift, artists William Hogarth and Louis Goupy, and she avoided a chance to marry Lord Baltimore, who once owned all of Maryland, and after whom the state's capital has been named.

When Queen Anne died in 1714 without an heir, life for the Stanleys changed rapidly with the arrival of George I. The couple no longer had any influence at court as the new King favored the Whigs and Lord Stanley was a Tory. Worse yet, Mary's uncle, George Granville, Lord Landsdowne (her father's middle brother and heir to the family fortune after the death of the eldest of the Granville boys) had been politically unwise by associating with the Jacobites. It led to an arrest and a stint in the Tower for Lord Landsdowne. Mary's parents removed themselves from London to retire in the countryside, which was hard for Mary, used to an active city life. Then, when Mary was 17, a letter arrived from Lord Landsdowne to invite Mary to stay with him and his wife. He had been released from prison, and had married a youngish widow with money.

Neither Mary nor her father knew that the good lord had plans for his niece. He needed to consolidate his political life again. The perfect foil for this was Alexander Pendarves, Tory MP from Cornwall, owner of Roscrow Castle, recently widowed without issue. He came to visit his fellow Tory, Landsdowne, in December 1717 while Mary was there. "I expected to have seen somebody with the appearance of a gentleman," Mary wrote decades later to a friend, "when the poor, old, dripping, almost drowned [Pendarves] was brought in the room, like Hob out of the well, his wig, his coat, his dirty boots, his large unwieldy person, and his crimson countenance."

Mary felt repelled by the slobbering, fat 60-year-old who had a penchant for heavy drink. Little had she realized that her uncle would see fit to exert pressure on his younger brother to marry her off to Pendarves. Bernard Granville depended on his older brother's less than kind largess to get by as he had inherited nothing from his father's estate. In fact, his brother had cut down his allowance further when he took in Mary. In February 1718 the then 17-year-old became Mrs. Pendarves and eventually moved to her husband's rundown estate in Cornwall. By 1721 Pendarves's  gout had become so bad they had decided to leave there and move back to London. Pendarves died in 1726, making a very young widow of Mary. She gained only a small widows pension from his estate as he had failed to change his will that left everything to his niece. But, while Mary did not end up with money she ended up with the determination not to marry again. Never again did she plan to give up her independence and she found many ways to make her small allowance stretch.

Then, while visiting friends in Ireland, she met Dr Patrick Delany, a Protestant Irish clergyman, and a friend of Swift's. When they met he had been engaged and nothing important happened between them until many years later, when as a 61-year-old widower he decided to call on her in London. They were married in 1743, and she began the second stage of her life in a contended love-match that lasted until his death in 1768. It took Mary a few years to recover and then one day she saw a red geranium and a matching piece of red paper. She picked up her scissors and began to cut. It was the start of her third life. And here is an irony. Among her friends and benefactors came to be George III and his queen, who settled her with a generous pension. George I cared little for the Granvilles and their offspring, yet his grandson recognized her talents and saw fit to ensure she had a good old age.