‘“Are you Abra Phillips?” the woman ponders, conscious that the words “mean something” to the girl,’ writes Joan Barfoot in the opening pages of Gaining Ground, a Canadian feminist classic now republished nearly 50 years after it first appeared as a debut novel entitled Abra. Who is Abra the hermit and who was Abra the mother? If it seems unlikely that a mother would abandon her children, consider how many fathers do the same thing. The reason this book still feels fresh is that many of us have been Abra Phillips at some point in our lives.