[Abra Phillips, the heroine of Gaining Ground, published in the United States and Canada as Abra] chooses, without obvious motivation, to cut herself off from all the social props supposed to enrich a woman's daily existence….

The life of a recluse has always been considered a valid temptation for a man, properly appealing to some romantic strain in the masculine temperament, whereas the woman living alone in the middle of nowhere is typically a witch or an outcast—at any rate, an oddity. Abra strongly repudiates the idea that she may be mad; what has overtaken her is not a "breakdown" but its opposite, a healing up…. The novel succeeds in communicating the charms of solitary living (sitting in front of a log fire, wrapped in a patchwork quilt), though it doesn't fail to stress the powers of endurance required to carry it through….

Joan Barfoot has resisted the impulse to turn all the small disasters, the wrongs and burdens and resentments of home life, into a comedy of bad manners or forgivable errors. To document recovery of spirits, to indicate the resources available to worldly and ironic wives, is the business of many clever and entertaining novelists. Joan Barfoot's purpose is more serious and radical; she is questioning assumptions about sanity and "proper" behaviour….

The problem involved in creating sympathy for an absconding mother (a figure in romantic fiction no less common than the foundling; and a character demanding serious treatment since the door of the doll's house was closed behind Nora) has always been the children. They are a responsibility not to be relinquished lightly. Not that Abra does anything lightly—neither frivolity nor callousness is a part of her nature. It is just that the enormity of her action never seems to strike her…. "I am guilty", Abra states; but we feel this is less a plea for understanding than an assertion of autonomy. For the same reason she will not admit that her husband is implicated in her departure; and perhaps as a consequence, he remains an ill-defined figure.

It is Abra's story, and this is the way she chooses to tell it. "Yes, of course I made him up", she says about her husband. "… I deliberately made him into nothing." It is a basic psychological trick, and also—cleverly—part of the narrative design. No point of view but Abra's can carry weight. The book requires a moral centre, of course, to balance conventional feelings attaching to the image of the negligent mother, and it has one; in place of the old morality of social duties and sacrifice is a new morality fundamentally opposed to posturing and role-playing. This is a gain in feminist terms. Abra's retreat signifies a private advance. It is an advance in the wider sense, too, representing progress, time for reassessment and revaluation; but Gaining Ground is above all a novel about personal integrity.