Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot review – Anne Enright celebrates a landmark feminist novel

There is a growing literature of maternal flight: novels about women who leave not just their husbands but also the children they have made. In the real world, men are the more frequent deserters; the connection of the father to family life is seen as contingent, while motherhood is revered as an intrinsic state. This means that women who “un-mother” themselves are doing something impossible: the connection between a woman and her child is not just emotional, but also creational. Joan Barfoot understands the inside-out nature of the logic involved in maternal obligation: “she created these other people and their need for her,” says Abra, the abandoning mother of Gaining Ground, “and now she must fulfil them.” Abra neglects to fulfil her children or their needs. The novel is rigorously and meditatively about the business of separation, which is also the business of becoming a single and undivided self. Gaining Ground came out in Canada in 1978, under the title Abra, before it was published in the UK under the current title by the Women’s Press in 1980. This was around the time Barfoot’s fellow Canadian Alice Munro began to write her adulterous, runaway women, whose instinct for freedom chimed so well with the feminism of the day. Abra is not sprung from domesticity by her desire for another man, however, nor does she return to her children, as Leda in Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter does, after years spent regaining what she had lost. Abra is closer to the protagonist in Cathy Sweeney’s recent Breakdown, who has no single answer to the question of why she left her former life: In Japan, Sweeney writes, “So many people disappear that there is a word for them – johatsu. It translates as evaporated people.” These novels cannot fully resist the question of whether the bolting mother is a monster or a victim of societal expectation. Gaining Ground was written before any of them and, already, Barfoot was wise enough to refuse the terms of the debate: Abra never que…