Joan Barfoot
Author of GAINING GROUND
Joan Barfoot photographed by Chloë Ellingson
There’s an oft-repeated maxim about a book finding its audience, and the sentiment couldn’t be more true for Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground, an evocative and emotionally complex novel making its way back to readers nearly fifty years after its original publication.
The weight of Abra Phillips’s existence has become debilitating. The demands of domesticity—her roles as housewife and mother “a mask and a charade, a play in which I performed”—have led her into the fog of an all-consuming void. When an exit presents itself, Abra compresses her life into a humble collection of pots, pans, mugs, silverware, and a few serviceable outfits, writes a note to her family—I have bought a place for myself with the money from Grandmother’s trust fund. Please don’t try to find me; I want to be left alone—and retreats to a stone cabin in the woods to pursue a hermetic lifestyle. When, after years of absence, a young woman shows up on her doorstep, Abra must contend with the life she surrendered.
“That life contained the dreamer, wishing vaguely, uneasily, for something different; and at the same time it contained, for a very long time, the practical woman, coping and comforting. The two had co-existed and not, it had seemed at the time, with the kind of trauma that required this result. For some, perhaps, that co-existence, the two lines running along in the same person, separated from each other like lines on a railroad without ties, are not parallel, but come together at some point, and when they do there is this cataclysm called a breakdown.
And yet that was not, it seemed to me, was had happened.”
A riveting exploration of interiority, time, and nature’s discursive pace, the novel has been out of print for decades. Originally published under the title Abra in Canada in 1978 before The Women’s Press printed it under its current title in 1980, Gaining Ground poignantly delves into a hinterland of desire and solitude, tracing the difficult details of Abra’s life as she detaches from society. Long considered a beloved but little known literary gem, it is now being introduced to a new generation of readers thanks to a rerelease by Faber. Of the occasion, Ella Griffiths, head of Classics & Heritage at the publishing house says, “I've never seen such a powerful groundswell of love for a novel that was unknown to many readers, as contemporary authors—from Booker Prize-winning author Samantha Harvey to Max Porter, Anne Enright, Margaret Drabble, Sarah Hall and beyond—spread the word and champion it with such passion, almost half a century later.”
Below, author Joan Barfoot shares the inspiration behind—and her feelings surrounding—the rerelease of her extraordinary first novel.
What was your introduction to storytelling, and do you remember when you first felt compelled to write a story of your own?
My mother and decade-older sister read to me persistently until, around age 4, all those mysterious black scritchings on the page suddenly formed into actual words. And then my mother offered to write down a story about a squirrel we were watching—where did it live, where was it going and why, all that sort of make-up-a-life tale-conjuring—so I learned it could actually be done, making a story where no story had existed before.
Much later, when I was a newspaper journalist, I was awash in the stories of others. As a journalist, there’s no control what happens to people, and there’s almost never a way to learn how an individual’s story turns out. So I came to hanker to write something more complete, and more satisfying (to me). That didn’t mean giving up journalism and factual story-telling, but I did come to want to make my own world bigger and more complete.
How did the idea for Abra/Gaining Ground arrive to you?
I’ve been trying to remember, but not very successfully. I was living in a big old house with half a dozen other people, and besides pursuing our various careers, we were also vaguely exploring notions of attentiveness to each moment. So there was occasional longing for solitude and what that might mean (along with the pleasures of lots of people around) as well as that exercising of exquisite concentration. And somewhere out of all that, and much more, such as questions about how a person might locate the life they actually belong in—along came Abra.
Faber's 2026 edition of Gaining Ground
"Like good reading, I think writing is an effort of really
grave empathy.”
—Joan Barfoot
What was the writing process like—how long did it take to complete the novel, where did you work on it, what was happening in your life at the time?
In that big old house, we each had our own bedrooms—in my case with a writing desk as well—along with lots of communal spaces. We lived just outside Toronto, and until I took a brief writing break, I was commuting into the city to work on a Sunday newspaper, The Toronto Sun. So the writing probably took two or three years, by the end of which I was moving to London, Ontario, for another journalism job.
There is an incredible depth to the character of Abra, and to the world of the novel—an emotional acuity and consideration that is at once astonishing and breathtaking. Can you describe what building and living alongside Abra was like?
Writing has always been a double kind of life—the daily events and dramas and relationships and so forth, alongside the completely private life of writing. And in every novel, that has meant simply living with, and more and more deeply within, at least one other human and their events and dramas and relationships. So with Abra, I could put myself aside at least for a few hours a day in favour of her. Like good reading, I think writing is an effort of really grave empathy.
Were there any other books—or perhaps films, pieces of music, or real-life events—that inspired parts of the novel? (Or, were there any that inspired you in a more general sense while you were writing?)
I don’t think so, not that come immediately to mind. What had the greatest, kick-starting impact was sort of ordinary and even funny. A friend, one of the men in our big old house, had returned from several months in Central America carrying the manuscript of a whole novel. That was so huge to me, such an accomplishment, and when I asked how he’d done it, he just said it had been, not an attempt to create 350 pages, but simply setting down one word after another. If there were no other particular inspiration, he made the work feel both manageable and human.
Barfoot pictured in 1979 signing copies of Abra
Photograph by Dick Wallace
What was your relationship to Abra once the writing was complete? As an author do you still think of your characters once the story has ended?
Well, once written, she went out into the publishing world—a fascinating process in itself—and then she was up for judgement for her choices, and so was I, as the person who’d created her. That was interesting. And yes, I do think of the people in my novels, with a variety of emotions. Some I admire, some delight me, and a couple I feel protective of—ones who seem to me too raw for the world. But I know very well who they each are.
The setting—Abra’s cabin—is the universe in which the novel unfolds. I’m curious to hear more about your inspiration for the location.
My parents had, alongside other professions, a cattle farm, with house and barn and animals and so forth, just outside the small Ontario city of Owen Sound. But they also owned a 100-acre totally undeveloped sort of bush and pasture property some kilometres farther into the countryside on which they grazed more cattle every summer. I remember the drives to that property along a main road, then turns onto a couple of narrowing gravel roads with big overhanging trees on each side, to get to that patch of rocky land—and that’s where I saw Abra. Although obviously her land included a cabin.
What were your feelings when the novel was originally published? How was it received at the time, what were the reactions from readers and critics?
One thing was, those were the days when newspapers had actual sizeable book sections, so the novel was fairly thoroughly reviewed. A few, as I vaguely recall, found it shocking—probably would still find it shocking—that a mother could leave her children behind, and got kind of stuck there. Others found it intriguing and gripping (and also, it must be said, really well written), and some almost entirely ‘got it’: the business of finding one’s own real nature and making the choice and decision to live in that true, bone-deep space. So, all in all, a fair range, among both reviewers and readers.
And then Abra won a national award for first novels, so that was pretty excellent.
Just shy of fifty years after its release, Faber is reissuing the novel. What was your reaction when you were contacted about it, and why do you think the story continues to resonate in 2026?
I thought it was magic, some kind of miracle. The Faber outreach came completely out of the blue, and how did that happen? Someone found a secondhand copy of the original British edition, which was also titled Gaining Ground, and everything went from there. And in the lead-up to publishing, they’ve sold about a dozen translation rights in various countries, and they’ve done a magnificent job of lining up some magnificent writers to offer magnificent blurbs—I couldn’t be more pleased.
As to the story itself, I think people are perhaps more exposed and open to being affected by these ideas—how genuinely interesting these questions are about choices made, what they’ve meant, whether or not they feel right or comfortable. Soul-searching, I guess.
You mentioned that you recently reread Abra/Gaining Ground—what was revisiting the novel like, what are your thoughts on it today?
It had been decades since I’d looked at it, and I was a bit scared. So I spent a day on my porch, reading the entire novel, and when I closed it, I was so relieved. Because—probably this sounds unCanadian—it’s radical, and intense, and it’s good.
You have published eleven books, including Dancing in the Dark, Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch, Critical Injuries, and Luck. What excites you most about writing?
I’m not writing any more. It was a kind of life-addiction, and now it’s not, and I don’t mind at all. I like what I’ve done, and it’s enough. Now I’m just fabulously old!
What do you hope this new readership finds in Gaining Ground?
I guess I hope people fall into it, experience Abra herself—and maybe later, give a thought or two to true natures—who a person might really be, and how much of a life gets built around expectations and norms and outside voices. Mostly, though, I hope they’re entranced.
Joan Barfoot is the award-winning author of eleven novels. A recipient of the Marian Engel Award, she has also been a journalist during much of her career. She lives in London, Ontario, Canada. Gaining Ground is available now.
Chloë Ellingson an independent documentary photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She publishes a Substack called Rangefinding. Discover her portfolio here, and follow along on Instagram.
Interview by Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz
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