"The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel offers an account of the way in which the language of "bloom," derived from scientific botany, enabled a licit, but nonetheless 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, as Amy M. King demonstrates, a subject described and plotted through the language of botany, a language whose ability to represent and evoke sexual fulfillment stood at its height in the nineteenth century." "By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, Bloom provides an entirely new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting 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."--Jacket.