Wright, Gilbert (author’s grandfather), 5.1, 9.1, 9.2
Wright, Ruth McMann (author’s grandmother), 1.1, 2.1, 5.1, 8.1, 9.1, 11.1, 11.2
Yale University: Beinecke Library, 12.1; Yale Center for British Art, 9.1, 13.1
Zincke, Christian Friedrich, 1.1, 14.1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was welcomed into the world of eighteenth-century scholarship and generously educated by many. First among them is Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Assistant Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art at the Walters Art Museum, who patiently and wittily contextualized Mrs. Delany’s life for me on many different occasions. Mark Laird, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, bolstered my initial enthusiasm and introduced me to many in his circle who would inform my ideas about Mrs. Delany. John Edmondson, Editorial Secretary of the Linnaean Society of London, gave me the education in botany that The Paper Garden required, correcting all my misconceptions with his good humor, generosity, and élan.
Kim Sloan, Assistant Keeper of British Drawings and Watercolors Before 1880, and Francis Finlay, Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery, at the British Museum, graciously welcomed me and instigated my thinking about amateur artists. My gratitude extends to many at the British Museum, especially Helen Sharp, Senior Conservator, Western Art on Paper, for her thorough explanations of conservation dilemmas, and the staff of the Prints and Drawings Study Room, particularly Angela Roche, Supervisor of the Study Room, for her ebullience (and magnifying glass), as well as Marta Cacho Casal and Alison Wright, who located and heaved up the albums of collages on multitudes of occasions. All of the women at the British Museum spiced my work with a detective’s sense of fun, as did the perceptive Kate Harris, Curator, Longleat Historic Collections, UK, and the intrepid Marie Long, Curator-Librarian at the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, New York Botanical Gardens. Needless to say, with this sort of collaboration, any mistakes in this book are solely mine.
I also wish to thank for his generosity Ken Soener, Director of the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, for their vision in mounting the 2009–10 “Mrs. Delany and Her Circle” exhibition, Amy Meyers, Director of the Yale Center for British Art, and Tim Knox, Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum.
The Paper Garden began as an essay, “Passion Flowers in Winter,” published in PoemMemoirStory no. 6 (2006), for which I thank editor Linda Frost. I am grateful as well to the late David Foster Wallace, who chose the work for Best American Essays 2007, and to the leadership of Robert Atwan, Series Editor for The Best American Essays. Without the foresight and gift of Shelby White, Trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, I would not have been privileged to be one of the first-year Fellows at the CUNY Graduate Center Leon Levy Center for Biography. It was a life-changing experience, especially aided by the guidance and support of Nancy Milford, Founding Director Emerita, and Faculty Director David Nasaw.
To my agent, Kathleen Anderson of Anderson Literary Management, and to Ellen Seligman, Vice-President and Senior Editor at McClelland and Stewart, Canada, both long supporters of my work, I have the pleasure of layering the thank-you for this book onto the thank-you for others, blessing my career. To Scott Richardson, the stellar designer for the book, and to Erin Kern, sweet-spirited facilitator, a garden full of thanks. And to Susan Renouf, the editor at McClelland and Stewart for The Paper Garden, whose visual imagination and editorial gusto let it grow into what it has become, I am grateful nine hundred and eighty-five times.
Margaret Maloney and George Gibson at Bloomsbury USA trusted in the electricity of Mrs. D., and Henry Rosenbloom at Scribe Books believed that craft is life. They have given this book world wings.
Two artists, Canadian painter Julie Hedrick and American collage artist Caroline Golden, ventured to the Yale Center for British Art to see the “Mrs. Delany and Her Circle” show and to report back with their impressions. Friends Ann McColl Lindsay, Dale Mathews, and Barbara Feldon read drafts at crucial moments, and Joan Stein commented when the work was at a precipice. I thank them all for the bounty of their candor.
I am more grateful to Ruth Hayden than I can express here. She has been my teacher and my prompter, with the help of her good-natured son-in-law, Roger Verrier-Jones. My last thanks of course go to my husband, Michael Groden, note-checker, joke-maker, scholar-model, and runner. Some projects burgeon as if planted under a new spring moon, and our Paper Garden was one of them.
Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including, most recently, The Second Blush. The Paper Garden, first published in Fall 2010, was a Number 1 national bestseller, one of the Globe and Mail ’s Best 100 Books of 2010, and was nominated for British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Peacock is Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English and a member of the Graduate Faculty of the Spalding University Brief Residency mfa Program. Her poems have appeared in such leading publications as The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Among her other works are How to Read a Poem … and Start a Poetry Circle and a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece. She lives in Toronto. Visit her at www.peacockpapergarden.com.
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