“Victorian! biography about the life of botanist Alma Whittaker. As always, Elizabeth Gilbert’s writing is light and engaging.
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a “Victorian” biographical novel about the life of botanist Alma Whittaker. Alma was born in Philadelphia in 1800, and she has a rare profession – a bryologist, she studies mosses, and mosses grow as slowly as Alma’s life goes by. Surprisingly, this novel of slow action, family conflicts and the inevitable crinolines turns out to be breathtakingly interesting. Its plot is the birth of modern science, primarily botany. Alma Whittaker lives at a time when science is as shy and brash as a teenager, when discoveries literally pile on top of each other and the theory of evolution emerges. Watching the development of a moss colony, Alma Whittaker comes to amazing conclusions, about the same as Darwin, although he does not publish his results.
Gilbert notes that a woman comes to science in a completely different way than a man. A man tries to conquer the world with knowledge, and a woman opens up to this world and takes it into herself. The heroine’s father, a businessman, feels nature well, but does not understand it. And Alma decides to take a step further and understand. The whole book is imbued with this passion for scientific research and study of the mysterious world of plants. A century and a half later, we are again on the threshold of discoveries, this time in the study of man, our consciousness and brain. And you can read Gilbert’s book, compare – and be surprised at the coincidence: our fast life turns out to be quite unhurried compared to the pace at which discoveries are taking place today.
Translation from English by Yulia Zmeeva. RIPOL classic, 512 p.