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‘[Q]uirky [and] gloriously unclassifiable … Ms. Piesse’s The Ghost in the Garden, with its many asides, intensely personal stories, and sometimes delightfully unrelated material … offers a radiant literary analogue for such botanical unpredictability.’
‘[Q]uirky [and] gloriously unclassifiable … Ms. Piesse’s The Ghost in the Garden, with its many asides, intensely personal stories, and sometimes delightfully unrelated material … offers a radiant literary analogue for such botanical unpredictability.’
‘A fascinating and very personal book in which Darwin’s relationship to his family’s garden reflects directly on his visionary understanding of the natural world in its entirety. A delight!’
‘Jude Piesse’s beautiful piece of detective work, The Ghost in the Garden, uncovers and brings to life the place that inspired the curiosity and spirit of enquiry of the boy and man who would become probably the most influential thinker and scientist in history: Charles Darwin. What makes this book so emotionally beguiling is the way the tale unfolds of an ordinary, yet handsome provincial house with a garden — and that was all it took. It moved me because inside Piesse’s book she could be describing every boy and girl free to roam and encouraged to explore, and you can feel the melancholy ghost of your own lost youth and heartbreak for those millions without the good fortune to have that freedom. It is a small story with a huge overtone that will stay with you long after the last page is turned.’
‘There are two ghosts in the garden here: the young Charles aboard the Beagle, writing salt-stained letters to his sisters, and the figure of Jude Piesse herself, author of this tender and unexpected memoir. Slightly at sea herself in a new job, at one point marooned in her new office by flood water, she gives a vivid picture of the obsessiveness of research: the hallucinogenic quality of the trees as she paces the overgrown garden, the feel of the manuscripts as she pores over the sisters’ letters in nine-hour stints in the library, a young woman navigating a course through early motherhood and the world of academe.’
‘The Ghost in the Garden is intelligent, curious, and moving nonfiction. It brings together biography, history, horticulture, and memoir — and does so with style and poignancy. Like the finest gardeners, Jude Piesse has laboured to give us something beautiful but also challenging; something that offers comforts without letting us get too comfortable with ourselves.’
‘Jude Piesse’s The Ghost in the Garden is a fascinating, beautifully written blend of biography, memoir, nature-writing, psychogeography, and history of science. Piesse shows us the human, quotidian world of the Darwin clan through the story of her discovery of their places and their stories, and the way they helped to seed Charles Darwin’s world-changing discoveries. In doing so, Piesse beautifully evokes what it is to be obsessed with a place, even when it no longer, quite, exists.’
‘What is special about The Ghost in the Garden is the combination of research with an empathetic imagination that enables Piesse to show how much Darwin was influenced by the seven-acre estate over which he had roamed as a boy … Piesse is a conscientious reporter.’
‘Skillfully blending memoir and biography … the result is an original take on a giant of science.’
‘It’s very well written, a beautiful book.’
‘Absorbing … Unexpected, fresh, and revealing … a joy.’
‘Well written and well researched.’
‘[Piesse] unearths a fascinating past.’
Jude Piesse is an academic and writer. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Exeter. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and culture, including her book about emigration literature, British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877 (OUP, 2016). Though she grew up in Shropshire, she did not discover Darwin’s childhood garden until she moved to Shrewsbury with her young family to take up her first lectureship. She now works as a lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University.