English
St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the
English Novel
Publisher: Oxford UP
New York, NY
2003, 265 pages
Bringing together novelistic courtships and the botanical
systems of Linnaeus and his followers, Bloom offers a striking
account of the way in which the language of “bloom,” derived from
scientific botany, enabled a sexualized representation of
maturation and marriage for novelists from Jane Austen to George
Eliot and Henry James. The girl in bloom—the girl at her social and
sexual peak—is a subject described and plotted through the language
of botany. Through a fusion of literary and scientific history,
King revokes the world of the botanical vernacular, a world in
which the “marriages of plants” and the marriages of humans helped
explain each other.
“Unusual for an academic study, Bloom combines meticulous
attention to the detail of cultural history and vigorous readings
of 19th-century fiction with the breathless excitement of someone
who has stumbled upon a story never previously told. Not unlike a
naturalist herself, perhaps, King dutifully scrutinizes and cares
for her thesis in order to give it life and help it grow,
convincingly tracking “bloom” from what began as an innocent enough
metaphor, derived from a long history of pastoral literature, until
it becomes a fixed feature of 19th-century fiction.”
—Alison Stenton, The Times Literary Supplement