After her mother's death, she remains at the family homestead - a botanical wonderland - managing her aging father and his business. While her adopted sister, Prudence, marries, has children and alienates her parents by becoming active in abolitionism, Alma stays put. "Calculus put her into fits of ecstasies." Beatrix raises Alma to be stoic, loyal and erudite - and Alma obliges beautifully.
Her father, the bombastic and bold Henry Whittaker, has lived a rags-to-riches life.īorn in England to poor farmhands, he made his fortune in the South American quinine trade, before settling in Philadelphia with his no-nonsense Dutch wife, Beatrix. She is born, rather dully, a little rich girl. Unsurprisingly, Alma's story is both astonishing and mundane as well. The two extremes, and their conjunction, are perhaps the dominant themes of Elizabeth Gilbert's historical novel "The Signature of All Things." Mosses, after all, are among the most humdrum of plants and yet, as Alma reasons, they have existed since "the dawn of life." She also concludes that "whatever is true for mosses must be true for all living things." If it all seems extraordinary and boring at once, it is, although purposefully so. She felt an affinity with them - the quiet ones." She saw them caress the pelts of moss, and watched their faces relax, their posture loosen. (The type of person, in other words, who had little interest in showy blossoms, mammoth lily pads, or crowds of loud families.) Alma enjoyed perching in a corner of the cave and observing these sorts of people enter the world she had made. Toward the end of her life, she creates an exhibit at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam called the Cave of Mosses, popular only to those who "longed for cool darkness, for silence, for reverie. Born in 1800 to a family of eccentric horticulturists, she spends decades chronicling the black sheep of plants, collecting thousands of samples, learning to differentiate them by touch. It is a unique trait among literary heroines to be obsessed with mosses, and yet Alma Whittaker is, utterly so.
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