This Must Be the Place: on Gaining Ground, Landscape and the Divided Woman in the Canadian Canon

“My name is Abra. My name is Abra. I had almost forgotten that; the naming of things lost its importance here, with no one to hear them named.” So begins Gaining Ground, the newly reissued novel by Canadian writer Joan Barfoot. Gaining Ground was initially published as Abra in Canada in 1978 and it is being reissued by Faber in the United Kingdom this month. When the book came out it …