Peopled with extraordinary characters - missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses and the quite mad -above all it has an unforgettable heroine in Alma Whittaker, a woman of the Enlightened Age who stands defiantly on the cusp of the modern. It soars across the globe from London, to Peru, to Philadelphia, to Tahiti, to Amsterdam. The Signature of All Things is a big novel, about a big century. But as her careful studies of moss take her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, the man she comes to love draws her in the opposite direction. It is not long before Alma, an independent girl with a thirst for knowledge, comes into her own within the world of plants and science. Alma's mother, a strict woman from an esteemed Dutch family, has a knowledge of botany equal to any man's. Her father, Henry Whittaker, is a bold and charismatic botanical explorer whose vast fortune belies his lowly beginnings as a vagrant in Sir Joseph Banks's Kew Gardens and as a deck hand on Captain Cook's HMS Resolution. In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. (Oct.At the beginning of a new century, Alma Whittaker is born into a perfect Philadelphia winter. A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge. Alma is a prodigy, but Gilbert doesn’t cheat: her life is unlikely but not impossible, and for readers traveling with Henry from England to the Andes to Philadelphia, and then with Alma from Philadelphia to Tahiti to Holland, there is much pleasure in this unhurried, sympathetic, intelligent novel by an author confident in her material and her form. Eventually Alma, who studies moss, enters into the most important scientific discussions of the time. Characters crisscross the world to make money, to learn, and, in Alma’s case, to understand not just science but herself and her complicated relationship with Ambrose.
Resigned to spinsterhood, ashamed and tormented by her erotic desires, Alma finds a late-in-life soul mate in Ambrose Pike, a talented botanical illustrator and spiritualist. Despite her wealth and education, Alma is a woman, and a plain one at that, two facts that circumscribe her opportunities.
Born in 1800, Alma learns Latin and Greek, understands the natural world, and reads everything in sight. In more detail, the story follows Henry’s daughter, Alma.
The story begins with Henry Whittaker, at first poor on the fringes of England’s Kew Gardens, but in the end the richest man in Philadelphia. It has an omniscient narrator who can deploy (never heavy-handedly) a significant amount of research into the interconnected fields of late 18th- and early 19th-century botany, botanical drawing, spiritual inquiry, exploration, and, eventually, the development of the theory of evolution. The Signature of All Things is a big, old-fashioned story that spans continents and a century. After 13 years as a memoirist, Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) has returned to fiction, and clearly she’s reveling in all its pleasures and possibilities.
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