Introduction

The Signature of All Things is an adult historical novel by American author Elizabeth Gilbert. It was published by Penguin Random House in 2013, and Gilbert had already established herself on the New York Times bestseller list with her two memoirs, Eat, Pray, Love (2006) and Committed (2010), after garnering critical acclaim for her earlier fiction, biographies, and magazine journalism.

The Signature of All Things spans the life of the fictional Alma Whittaker, a keenly curious and practical amateur botanist who comes of age on her wealthy father’s Philadelphia estate, falls in love, travels abroad, and arrives at a startling understanding of evolution just before Charles Darwin releases his groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species. A detailed, sweeping epic of the 19th century and the birth of science, Gilbert’s novel was named a Best Book of 2013 by The New York Times, O Magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The New Yorker and was also nominated for the 2014 Carnegie Medal for Fiction. This guide quotes from the hardcover edition published by Viking in 2013, which includes reproductions of botanical illustrations in the cover, endpapers, and section headings.

Content Warning: The Signature of All Things features outdated and offensive terms that were widely used in the 19th century to describe Black and Indigenous people and gay men. Self-harm is also mentioned.

Plot Summary

Henry Whittaker is one of the richest men in the US and has built the estate of White Acre as well as a thriving business in medicinal plants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The novel’s opening chapters describe Henry’s origins: He is born to a poor family living near London, and his father works at Kew Gardens. After he is caught stealing and selling plants, Henry is sent on a voyage with Captain Cook and thereafter to Peru. When the director at Kew laughs in his face in answer to his request to become a fellow of the Royal Society, Henry instead establishes a cinchona plantation in the Dutch colony of Java and makes a fortune selling Jesuit’s bark, which is used as a cure for malaria. He eventually marries a Dutch woman named Beatrix, whose family, the van Devenders, have run a famous botanical garden in Amsterdam for centuries, and the couple moves to the US.

Their daughter, Alma, is born in 1800 and is their only child. Alma is educated by her intelligent, no-nonsense mother; is cared for by their Dutch housekeeper, Hanneke; and is allowed to roam their estate of White Acre with her pony and a magnifying glass, building her own herbarium. When Alma is nine, Beatrix adopts Prudence, the orphaned daughter of one of their estate workers and a beautiful and reserved girl who is determined to improve herself. The sisters are polite but not close or affectionate, and Prudence is known as the lovely one while Alma is dubbed the intelligent one.

As she grows up, Alma continues her studies, participates in lively discussions at the dinner table with her father’s guests, and takes over the task of organizing the White Acre library. When she is 16, Alma discovers an erotic book that leads to her discovery of self-pleasure. She hides the book in the library’s binding closet, a tiny space used to repair books. Alma confides to Prudence that she is in love with George Hawkes, a publisher who prints the papers that Alma writes on various botanical subjects. She and Prudence befriend their lively new neighbor, a young woman their own age, Retta Snow, who introduces laughter and pleasure into their calm and orderly lives.

Beatrix dies of cancer when Alma is 20, and Alma takes her mother’s place in running the household and helping her father with his business empire. She feels betrayed when she learns that Retta is to marry George Hawkes and Prudence is to marry their old tutor. Hanneke counsels Alma to remain stoic and carry on, as a Whittaker should. Inspired by an early publication, Alma investigates the mosses growing on a cluster of boulders on the White Acre property and is so fascinated by the tiny, amazing plants that she decides to devote her life to studying them.

In 1848, Alma is 48 and is now the author of two books on mosses. She continues to live with her father, faithfully keeping her promise to her mother never to leave him. She helps George to settle Retta in an asylum, as she is suffering from a degenerative mental illness. Meanwhile, Prudence’s involvement with abolitionist causes put her at odds with Henry, who disowns her. The plot gains further traction when George receives a book of prints by an unknown artist, the quality of which stuns him and Alma both; these illustrations of orchids are works of art, including some specimens never before seen.

Alma invites the artist, Ambrose Pike, to visit White Acre and finds him to be a kind, intelligent, sensitive man who is delighted by everything. Despite her consternation at Ambrose’s views of the spiritual world—Alma is a scientist who only believes what she can see and sense—the two nonetheless fall into a quiet companionship and grow to share their work and their lives. When Ambrose asks Alma to marry him, she readily accepts; she is in love for the first time in her adult life.

However, Alma is crushed and humiliated when Ambrose does not consummate the marriage. Instead, he wants to continue their spiritual companionship and friendship, while Alma wants them to be lovers. A heartbroken Alma sends Ambrose to Tahiti to tend to a vanilla plantation that Henry owns there, and three years later, she receives word from the Reverend Francis Welles that Ambrose, much loved among those at the mission at Matavai Bay, has died. Realizing that Ambrose is gone forever, Alma grieves all over again, but when Henry’s man of business visits with Ambrose’s effects, she is shocked to discover that the valise contains pictures of a beautiful young Tahitian man—sensual, admiring pictures that lead her to conclude that Ambrose must have desired men.

When Henry dies, he leaves his entire estate to Alma, who learns from Hanneke that Prudence also loved George Hawkes but turned down his proposal of marriage because she knew how Alma felt. Alma’s world is shaken to its very foundations by these revelations; she feels as though a life spent in pursuit of knowledge has left her with no understanding of anything at all. She gives Henry’s estate to the Philadelphia Abolitionist Society with the stipulation that Prudence turn the house into a school for the children of freed slaves. Prudence weeps when she hears this news, a rare show of feeling for her. Alma then sails for Tahiti.

In Matavai Bay, Alma is taken in by the kindly Reverend Welles and searches for the subject of Ambrose’s pictures. She finally finds him when she meets Reverend Welles’s adopted son, who goes by the name Tomorrow Morning. When she manages to speak with him alone, Alma learns that Tomorrow Morning desired and seduced Ambrose. In shame at giving up his celibacy, Ambrose died by suicide. Alma weeps for Ambrose all over again, but she is glad to have answers to his demise. When Alma nearly drowns during a ball game to celebrate Tomorrow Morning’s departure, she comes to a realization that answers the questions she has been asking all her scientific life about the mechanism that causes species to change. Every organism, Alma decides, is driven by survival—the sheer will to live.

On her voyage away from Tahiti, Alma writes a treatise on what she calls her theory of competitive alteration. She goes to the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam and asks her uncle, Dees van Devender, for a job. When he reads her treatise, Dees embraces Alma into the family, and Alma becomes the Curator of Mosses at the garden but resists Dees’s attempts to persuade her to publish her paper. She believes her theory is incomplete because she cannot resolve what she thinks of as the Prudence Problem. Why, she wonders, if survival and competition drive all living things, do some people choose to sacrifice themselves for the good of others?

When she reads Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species in 1859, Alma is astonished and overwhelmed to hear her own theory formulated but in a more elegant, eloquent way, and she cannot begrudge Darwin his success because he was developing his theory long before her realization. Alma follows with interest the career of Alfred Russel Wallace, another botanist who presented a paper on a theory similar to Darwin’s at nearly the same time. When she is 82, Alma invites Wallace to speak at the Hortus and shares her treatise with him. He is astounded that all three of them came to the same conclusion, but they agree that Darwin deserves recognition for the breakthrough. Alma reflects that she has had a fortunate life.