tamaranth | 2026/075: The Signature of All Things

2026/075: The Signature of All Things — Elizabeth Gilbert

Alma’s world and the moss world had been knitted together this whole time, lying on top of each other, crawling over each other. But one of these worlds was loud and large and fast, where the other was quiet and tiny and slow—and only one of these worlds seemed immeasurable. [p. 162]

Alma Whittaker, the focus of this novel, is born in 1800 and grows up in a wealthy household on the White Acre estate just outside Philadelphia. Her father Henry grew up in poverty, impressed Sir Joseph Banks with his initiative and his horticultural gifts, and made his money cultivating cinchona, a remedy for malaria.

Alma is brought up to be fascinated with the natural world and to think for herself. At first, the only surviving child of Henry and his Dutch wife Beatrix, Alma is rather lonely: suddenly she acquires an adopted sister, Prudence, who is beautiful but reticent. She and Alma (who is plain) are never close.

The girls grow up. Alma develops a fascination with mosses, and conducts scientific correspondence with botanists all over the world. Prudence marries and becomes a committed abolitionist: Alma marries rather later, but her husband -- Ambrose, an artist -- is ... not what she had expected, wanted, craved. After her father's death she makes some momentous decisions, travels to Tahiti (where Ambrose had been exiled), and thence to Amsterdam.

I've done my best to avoid spoilers in that summary: I found the novel very slow, but a lot happens, actually as well as emotionally. I very much liked Gilbert's depiction of Alma as a sensual, as well as an intellectual, individual: I was fascinated by Alma's mosses, and her theories. I did not warm to any of the other characters -- perhaps because Alma, though she loves them, maintains some emotional distance.

This is also, in a way, a novel about early nineteenth-century science, and especially the theory of evolution. Alma considers the possibility: 'those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them'. But there is no room in this world view for compassion, altruism, selflessness. Only on her return from Tahiti does she read of a new book by Charles Darwin...

Looking back on the experience of reading this novel, I find much to admire. Gilbert's prose has an Austenesque cadence that fits Alma very nicely ('her botanical drawings—which were never exactly beautiful, but always beautifully exact') and there are many vivid moments. But it felt so slow and claustrophobic while I was reading: and Alma's ~~escape~~ departure from White Acre, though an immense relief to me as well as her, did not immediately improve matters. And there's one scene, on Tahiti, that really bothered me: but ... spoilers.

...she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This fact was not merely true about the lives of human beings; it was also true of every living entity on the planet, from the largest creation down to the humblest. It was even true of mosses. This fact was the very mechanism of nature—the driving force behind all existence, behind all transmutation, behind all variation—and it was the explanation for the entire world. It was the explanation Alma had been seeking forever. [p. 434]