Flower Diary—

“Reading a book by Peacock is like listening in on a fascinating conversation, in which one can learn about philosophical concepts such as ukiyo, the Buddhist notion of the fleeting nature of life, one minute and about the Empathists, who suggested that a spectator and a painting share a unique space through “psychological connection,” or even about thought-provoking acknowledgements of traditional Indigenous territory the next.”

Carol Bishop-Gwyn, Literary Review of Canada

“As in her previous biography about Mary Delaney, the inventor of cut paper botanical collage, Peacock interlays Hiester Reid’s story with scenes from her own life. In this case, the author tells the story of her relationship with her late husband, who died last year. Peacock is also a poet, and her prose is lyrical and poignant.”

Lauren Moya Ford, Hyperallergic

Poet and author Molly Peacock has spent eight years researching the life of Mary Hiester Reid, a 19th-century American painter who, at 31, married Canadian artist George Agnew Reid, a fellow student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The result is Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries and Opens a Door, a speculative biography that follows Reid from Philadelphia to Paris, Madrid, Toronto and a summer artists’ colony in the Catskill Mountains to determine how she juggled her career and the household of her more famous husband. Peacock… discovered Reid when she was shown A Study in Greys, a 1913 image of two flower jugs and a pewter plate that echoes the famed tonalism of the American painter James McNeill Whistler. In that painting, as in Reid’s private life, a threesome becomes a theme.

Kate Taylor, The Globe & Mail

“Poet and nonfiction writer Molly Peacock offers a rich and thought-provoking exploration of 19th-century artist Mary Hiester Reid in Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries and Opens a Door. As she did in The Paper Garden, her wonderful book on the botanical artist Mary Delany, Peacock skillfully melds personal musings on the lives of creative women with her look at the historical life. Among other things, Flower Diary is insightful about the ways women had (and have) to juggle multiple roles and responsibilities to make time for a serious creative practice.”

Society Nineteen Journal

“I loved everything about this beautiful book … Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door is gorgeously written, illustrated, and groundbreaking.”

Enchanted Prose

“Part memoir, part biography, this is a beautifully written and layered volume that opens its arms wide and encompasses art, domesticity, the intimacy of marriage and of death. Lush and beautifully produced.”

Sue Carter, Toronto Star

“Does it make her description any less plausible that it never would have occurred to me to read so much drama into these quietly lovely flowers? … “You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes famously chides Dr. Watson: it takes a trained eye, a sympathetic eye, perhaps a poetic eye, to see what Peacock sees. Her poet’s words, of course, also make the difference between plain description and illumination.

Rohan Maitzen, Novel Readings

“In Flower Diary, Molly Peacock has produced an exquisitely unique work. A meticulous biography that’s also an eloquent, sophisticated portrait of intimate relationships, this book is about many things: the discipline required to make fine art, the emotional resilience required to sustain a marriage, the emotional turbulence hiding inside ‘simple’ floral paintings. Most of all, though, it’s a clear-eyed, unsentimental tribute to those who have the luck and fortitude to carry out their lives on their own terms. I devoured every detail, and was both moved and inspired.”

Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects Of Discussion

“Flower Diary, published by ECW Press, with its carefully reproduced paintings, gorgeous endpapers and glossy paper stock, puts it in the running as the most stunning book to come out of Canadian publishing this year.”

Sue Carter, Toronto Star

Having already read The Paper Garden, I had fully expected to fall in love with Mary Hiester Reid. And, indeed, Molly Peacock very quietly--and very capably--introduced me to a woman I could love. But it was also a rare delight to see my city, the City of Toronto, through both Peacock’s and MHR’s eyes, at the remove of a century… Like my favourite books of Toronto--Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Redhill's Consolation--I tried to read Flower Diary by a busy window, so that I could marvel at a changing landscape and the remarkable people (fictional and real) who shaped it, and were shaped by it.

Emily McKibbon, Goodreads.com