“The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility,” Gilbert writes. In place of romantic fulfilment, Alma becomes fascinated by the study of mosses and, in many ways, these plants reflect the intricate but slow-moving quality of Alma’s own existence. Gilbert renders her longing with exquisite precision, conveying both Alma’s naivety and her frustration in an age when women were not permitted to admit to any kind of sexual need.

Her adopted sister, Prudence, is the beautiful one who attracts many admiring male gazes, but she is difficult to know: an icy, self-contained girl who holds intimacy at bay.Īlma yearns for friendship, for love and for knowledge. She devours books and has fervid erotic imaginings but no appropriate suitor. Growing up surrounded by her family’s expansive estate, Alma becomes fascinated by botany and shows herself to have a shrewd business mind. Not that Henry himself objected to this state of affairs Henry Whittaker enjoyed looking at his image wherever he might encounter it.” Her father, Henry, is a self-made titan: one of the three richest men in the western hemisphere, with a fortune built on a thriving import-export business dealing in exotic plants.Īs a child, Alma is clever, sharp but un-pretty, having the misfortune of looking precisely like her father: “ginger of hair, florid of skin, small of mouth, wide of brow, abundant of nose”, Gilbert writes, before leavening the observation with a typical flash of wry humour: “Henry’s face was far better suited to a grown man than to a little girl. It tells the story of Alma Whittaker, “born with the century” in 1800, in the midst of a Philadelphia winter. The Signature of All Things, Gilbert’s sixth book and her second work of full-length fiction, is quite simply one of the best novels I have read in years. Thank God, then, that I have finally seen sense. But until last month, I still hadn’t read any of her actual writing.

I later discovered that Gilbert was an acclaimed long-form journalist – her 1997 feature in GQ detailing her time working as a table-dancing barmaid in New York’s East Village provided the basis for the 2000 film Coyote Ugly(a movie that remained a guilty pleasure throughout my early 20s). This was in spite of several friends telling me that Eat, Pray, Love was actually very well written and that the movie had done the book a disservice. Like many who nurture literary prejudice, I had always been slightly dismissive of Gilbert, imagining her to be a glorified self-help writer. That book sold by the bucketload, made Bali a tourist destination for depressed divorcees and was later adapted into a schmaltzy film starring Julia Roberts. A ll I really knew about Elizabeth Gilbert before picking up her new novel was that she had written Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir detailing her search for spiritual enlightenment in the wake of a marital break-up.

The signature of all things gilbert