The Signature of All Things

I am not a fan of science, finding it a difficult subject. But I absolutely loved this book. I appreciated all the characters and found the story entrancing.This was my beach read and it kept pulling me from the water to see what would happen next. It has made me want to read more by this author.

Gilbert writes in a polished yet poetic way that takes you into the 1800s and follows the life of Alma from the generation before, throughout her whole life. It's not a heart-warming tale and could be construed as somber, however, it interplays science and spirituality and love and lust and goals accrued in private and let go of as equally in secret.It's perspective-giving regarding travel and how arduous it had been, taking months by sea what can now take hours by flight.The Signature of All Things did a fabulous job of showing that things are not always as they appear, or perhaps they are more than we can comprehend.

I find I really like this style of writing with the omnipotent narrator who can tell us what everyone is thinking. This reads like nonfiction which I also like. I adore knowledge and resonated with Alma and was a bit jealous. However, I doubt I would give up my marriage and children for the fascinating and encompassing level of study Alma engaged in…but I guess it was not an choice for either of us. I had to earn a living and she was too isolated to find love in time for family. I hesitated on four stars and thought long about the fifth, but my rule for five stars is; I will read it again or it made me laugh and or cry and or I kept quotes and while I found much of the story sad and definitely profound, it didn’t quite meet the requirements. I will revisit if I do happen to return to read it again. I do however highly recommend it!

Elizabeth Gilbert takes the reader into the eighteenth century world of botany where passionate amateur botanists collected plants from all over the world. This world is closely connected with colonialism and many plants are sourced from countries newly discovered by Europeans and colonised , including South America and Tahiti.The plants collected by European botanists had the potential to make the collector extremely wealthy, if the plants happened to have medicinal properties to fulfil the European desire for protection from such diseases as malaria.Through his knowledge of plants, cleverness and impressive initiative, Henry Whittaker manages to amass a fortune from trading medicinal plants and thereby escapes his humble origins.The focus of the novel is his daughter, Alma Whittaker, who from an early age is immersed in the world of plants and surrounded by spectacular and exotic specimens from far-away places. She is also born into extraordinary wealth, and lives the first half of her life in seclusion at her parents estate in Pennsylvania but connected with the world through her father's incredible trade in rare and wonderful plants.In making Alma the focus, Gilbert is also bound to explore the position of women. In spite of her family's immense wealth, Alma's future options are greatly limited by her large and unattractive appearance. Realizing the truth of this Alma throws herself into her botanical studies, in particular, her chosen subject of mosses. They, like her, are unspectacular but work away quietly in the background of things.Alma acquired, in her early teens, an adopted sister, the daughter of her father's employees who had died. Alma's plain appearance is emphasised by contrast with her spectacularly beautiful sister and the relationship between them is a guarded one.The novel traces Alma's search for emotional connection and her unfulfilled sexual desire, at the same time as it celebrates her achievements as a world class botanist. Alma's character is explored in great depth. However, the supporting characters tend to be somewhat 2-dimensional and viewed from Alma's limited perspective: the beautiful and self-sacrificing sister, the husband who eschews sex in his search for spiritual experience; the ditzy friend who eventually becomes mentally unhinged.The novel presents contrasting attitudes: the wholehearted pursuit of the spirit versus the belief in academic study and research as the highest goal. The novel is full of surprises and Alma seeks fulfillment with courage. It was a thoroughly engaging read

What a wonder is The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, lush, verdant and efflorescent like the plants that fill its pages. You can’t help but get pulled in and up by the narrative in the way all living things reach for the sun. The characters are robust and noteworthy, from the daring, adventuresome and iron-willed Henry Whittaker, whose personality is as extreme as the some of the climates in which grow his favorite botanicals, and who endures much at great personal cost to rise above his very lowly beginnings, to his brilliant and stoic wife, Beatrice, who leaves her Dutch family to move to the United States with Henry and make their mark on the world, to their only natural offspring, Alma, as strong-willed as her father, and erudite as her mother. As a child, Henry had tasted real poverty and loathed it. His less than illustrious start instilled in him the determination to escape from poverty and build a botanical and pharmaceutical empire. Despite Henry’s father’s employment as a gardner at the Kew botanical gardens, the jewel of the English Crown, the family lived in squalor, and for that Henry blamed his father. Through courage, determination and his refusal to be kept down, Henry moved to America and became king of the botanical import world, building an empire which he then passed down to Alma who became his equal in most all ways, although it takes her the span of the novel to figure that out. From a young age, Alma strove for an intellectual understanding of the world around her. She spent the bulk of her childhood, analyzing and cataloguing the curious flora and fauna at White Acre, her father’s estate in Philadelphia, riding her pony into the woods to collect specimens and returning to study them under a microscope. Alma was neither comely like her adopted sister Prudence, nor impish and entertaining like her friend Retta. She saw little chance of ever forming a marriage bond so work was it, and being Dutch by ancestry, she thrived in that undertaking, throwing herself into it both physically and with her broad sweeping intellect. Just when she thought there was nothing left to discover, Alma stumbled upon a category of botanicals she had heretofore overlooked: mosses. The discovery couldn’t have come at a better time. With the death of Alma’s mother, the care and keeping of Henry Whittaker had passed to Alma and, stuck at White Acre, Alma was in need of a new endeavor to rescue her from the boredom of knowing a place too well. Mosses filled that hole, giving her decades of research to keep her occupied in her newfound role. Yet despite all indications to the contrary, Alma will travel farther than she ever dreamed possible before it’s all done. The Signature of All Things is a gargantuan undertaking and so much more than a well-researched bit of historical fiction. You will have to look pretty hard to find a heroine that’s as true to herself, and a book more remarkable in evoking that truth. Signature is alive with the enigmatic spirit of nature, a paean to the goddess energy in all living things, animal, mineral and vegetable. The very pages come alive with the spark of the divine that creates and imbues the world and everything that lives in it, or as Gilbert calls it, The Signature of All Things.