CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION: The Girl and the Water Lily -- ONE: Linnaeus's Blooms: The Birth of the Botanical Vernacular -- The Rise of Botanical Culture -- The Mechanics of the Botanical Vernacular -- Botanical Mimetics and the Novel -- The Eighteenth Century: Occluded Blooms -- Toward the Nineteenth Century: The Bloom Narrative -- TWO: Imaginative Literature and the Politics of Botany -- Botany's Gendered Controversies -- Botanical Modesty: Edgeworth's Belinda -- Botanical Poetry: Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin -- THREE: Austen's Physicalized Mimesis: Garden, Landscape,Marriageable Girl -- Lovers Walk: Burney's Evelina and Austen's Pride and Prejudice -- Improving Grounds, Improving Complexions -- Bloom: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion -- FOUR: Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms -- Ossification: Midcentury Bloom in Dickens -- Revivification: Midcentury Bloom in Middlemarch and Adam Bede -- Organic Realism: Eliot and Natural History -- FIVE: Inside and Outside the Plot: Rewriting the Bloom Script in James -- The Critic and Bloom -- The Girl as Topic: Watch and Ward and The Awkward Age -- A Blooming Consciousness: The Portrait of a Lady -- Bloom's Decadence: The Wings of the Dove and The Picture of Dorian Gray -- CODA: Later Bloomings: Molly's Bloom -- NOTES -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.