Bloom

• Introduction: The Girl and the Water LilyChapter 1: Linnæus's Blooms: The Birth of the Botanical VernacularThe Rise of Botanical CultureThe Mechanics of the Botanical VernacularBotanical Mimetics and the NovelThe Eighteenth Century: Occluded BloomsTowards the Nineteenth Century: The Bloom NarrativeChapter 2: Imaginative Literature and the Politics of BotanyBotany's Gendered ControversiesBotanical Modesty: Edgeworth's BelindaBotanical Poetry: Charlotte Smith and Erasmus DarwinChapter 3: Austen's Physicalized Mimesis: Garden, Landscape, Marriageable GirlLovers Walk: Burney's Evelina and Austen's Pride and PrejudiceImproving Grounds, Improving ComplexionsBloom: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, PersuasionChapter 4: Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary BloomsOssification: Mid-Century Bloom in DickensRevivification: Mid-Century Bloom in Middlemarch and Adam BedeOrganic Realism: Eliot and Natural HistoryChapter 5: Inside and Outside the Plot: Rewriting the Bloom Script in JamesThe Critic and BloomThe Girl as Topic: Watch and Ward and The Awkward AgeA Blooming Consciousness: The Portrait of a LadyBloom's Decadence: The Wings of the Dove and The Picture of Dorian GrayCoda: Later Bloomings: Molly's BloomNotes

The intricate cultural web linking nature, flowers, sex and marriage with the English novel is clearly drawn and persuasively developed...Bloom combines meticulous attention to the details of cultural history and vigorous readings of nineteenth-century fiction with the breathless excitement of someone who has stumbled upon a story never previously told.