Science and Sensibility 
 The hardbound edition of this book is such a beautiful object that it just leaps into the hand. Not so much the cover, but the gorgeous color of the botanical lithographs used as end-papers, with similar engravings introducing the book's five sections, coupled with distinguished type and fine deckle-edged paper. It is a joy to hold and to read. Given the author's success with an inspirational memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, I had worried that this might turn out to be a mere boutique novel. I need not have done. It is the serious story, in nineteenth-century fullness, of a nineteenth-century woman, Alma Whitttaker, born to wealth, condemned to solitude, and ending as one of the leading botanists of her day. It is simply superb. 
 Serious, but not without humor. The novel is written in an elegant style that Thackeray or Trollope would have recognized, but Gilbert also shares their lightness of touch; the book is often funny and always readable. And nineteenth-century detail does not imply nineteenth-century sensibility; in particular, there is a frankness about sexual matters that belongs to our own time. After reading of Alma's remarkable childhood, tutored in mathematics and several languages, and above all exploring the natural wonders in her father's large estate outside Philadelphia, it is a surprise when in her teens her biological explorations turn to her own body. I even wondered if Gilbert were pandering to the prurience of modern readers--but I should have trusted her; all these things will bear fruit much later in the story. Big-boned, plain-featured, and with a shock of unruly red hair, Alma is far from the normal debutante, and suitors pass her by--but she is aware of her needs, and she does fall in love. In almost no sense is this a conventional love story, but it does have romance, and more than once brought tears to my eyes. 
 The novel starts with Alma's birth. But while waiting for her to grow old enough to be interesting, Gilbert offers a picaresque Bildungsroman at novella length featuring Henry Whittaker, Alma's father. Born in poverty as the son of an arborist in London's Kew Gardens, Henry gets ahead by stealing and marketing plant specimens. Later, after sailing around the world with Captain Cook, he establishes a plantation of stolen chinchona trees (the source of quinine), thus wresting the monopoly from the Spanish Jesuits, and soon expands to other aspects of medicinal botany, becoming exceedingly rich in the process. The story then turns to Alma. 
 What Alma wanted to know most of all was how the world was regulated. What was the master clockwork behind everything? She picked flowers apart and explored their innermost architecture. She did the same with insects, and with any carcass she ever found.Gilbert's use of the word "clockwork" is not accidental, because as we move into the middle of the century, the question of origins becomes more and more a part of scientific thinking; is the world as we see it the creation of a Master Watchmaker or formed by natural processes? 
 Alma, though a conventional churchgoer, is a strict atheist in her science. But her most profound experiences will come when she meets a remarkable younger man, a botanical illustrator of exquisite skill, who nonetheless believes in forces that defy logic. Eventually, through her study of mosses, she will develop her own theories very similar to those of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, but decline to publish them because of her concern with issues of human behavior--altruism and self-sacrifice--that seem to contradict the idea of the survival of the fittest. This internal conflict, between science and spirituality (or at least humanity), is the subject of the entire book in a nutshell. It may lose a little momentum two-thirds of the way through (oddly enough, when Alma leaves her Philadelphia estate and begins to travel around the world). But it never loses its integrity or its particular access to grace, summed up beautifully by Alma's reaction to reading The Origin of Species: 
 It was a beautiful book. She wavered, as she read it, between heartbreak and vindication, between regret and admiration.I might say much the same myself, about Gilbert's book.