If I remember correctly, back in grad school, my friends Dustin and Allison loaned me this book after they read it for some kind of book group. They had hated it, and they wanted me to read it so that I could agree with them. I added it to my reading list. This was back in 2014; by the time I moved away from Connecticut in 2017, I had of course not actually gotten around to reading it. I gave them their copy back—and they expressed disappointment because they didn't want it back!
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Published: 2013 Read: August 2025 |
But I did keep it on my reading list, and once it finally surfaced earlier this year, I checked it out from the local library. The novel is about the life story of a woman, from childhood up to old age across the course of the nineteenth century; her father is an English grower of plants, her mother from a Dutch business family; and she is raised by them in America, outside Philadelphia. She is fascinated by mosses, and struggles against the strictures of her father and the world in which she lives and her own limited understanding of herself and others.
I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't claim to love it either. Gilbert can create an affecting scene at times—the image of the party where the attendees are all positioned like the planets in the solar system, the final meeting between Alma and Alfred Russell Wallace—but I didn't have a strong feeling of what it was all for. Or perhaps more accurately, I didn't feel like the length of the book (around five hundred pages) was proportionate to what it was trying to do. Obviously I don't mind a long book, I'm a Victorianist, but the payoff of what Alma learned about life (and thus what the reader learns about life) didn't really seem to correlate with how much time we had to spend reading about it.
It was a total coincidence of timing, but I definitely benefited from reading the book shortly after Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. The former's depiction of the brutality of the early United States resonated with what we see here; the latter gave a lot of background and context for Alma's ruminations on evolution and eventual meeting with Wallace.
