The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys

Spring 1941 in England- Gwen Davis is a gardener who volunteers to reclaim the gardens at an estate outside London as a war effort.  She finds a hidden garden, really three gardens, and she realizes the first time she finds them that she is the first person to find them since they were abandoned, and that she was meant to find them.  

she is in charge of a group of Land Girls, while soldiers under the command of Captain Raley reside in the house, awaiting orders to go into combat.  Jane is a frail young woman whose fiance is missing in action.  All three of these characters are dealing with loss, as are all the other characters, who do chalk drawings of their past on the blackout curtains. The lost garden consists of three parts, Longing, Faith, and Loss.  Gwen sets out to find who created this garden, who is the white figure that keeps stealing chickens, and who are the people everyone has left behind. She herself is mourning a mother who never loved her, as well as the author Virginia Woolf ( I really must read To The Lighthouse)!,

This is a beautifully constructed novel, only 182 pages long. Humphreys manages to pack a lot of information and images into such a short novel that you feel it was much longer.  As the book jacket says, it is "word perfect".

I especially enjoyed how she related Virginia Woolf to the story: she is certain she followed her one evening on a busy London street, and nowWoolf has died without Gwen ever speaking to her.  But, upon hearing Jane read To The Lighthouse to her friend David as he knits a sweater for his fiance back home, Gwen realizes that she has shared her life with Woolf: the book is the shared intimacy.(page 156)

"There is VW, dipping her pen in ink, looking up from the page with Lily on the lawn, to the view outside her window.  Here am I, looking across the room to the the summer dark beating against these mullioned panes.  There is Jane reading the words aloud to a young soldier sitting beside her.  It is a place we have arrived at, this book.  The characters fixed on the page.  The author who is only ever writing the book, not gardening or walking or talking, and while the reader is reading, the author is always here, writing.  The author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.  And this is what you're doing, being in the book, entering it as one enters a room, and sees there, through the French doors to the garden, Lily Briscoe painting on the lawn."