Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel. 2003. illustr. 276 p. gr8vo. Hardcover.

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawned - naturalhistory, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience - this study offers a fresh, detailed reading of the courtshipnovel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimatinga cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides an entirely new and powerful account of the novel's role inscripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl,that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.