NEH Fellowship

Trinity College Professor of English Sarah Bilston’s upcoming book, The Hunt for the Lost Orchid, delves into the dangerous and deceitful world of orchid hunting in the 19th century. To support her as she uncovers the history and mysteries behind this international obsession, Bilston has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship. The six-month grant follows an NEH summer stipend that supported her work on this project last year.

Bilston’s book, to be published by Harvard University Press, follows the hunt for the “lost orchid”—Cattleya labiata—as a means of investigating the rise of consumerism and collection culture in the period, the shifting meanings of the orchid in Victorian visual and literary texts, the intersection of big science and big business, and the power of colonial profit-making. The book narrates the 1818 arrival in Britain of a particularly glorious purple-and-crimson orchid and the rise, in the aftermath, of a cultural obsession with orchids in Europe and North America.

“ ‘Orchidomania,’ or ‘Orchidelirium,’ was the 19th-century equivalent of ‘tulip fever,’ ” said Bilston, whose research and teaching focus on literature of the British Victorian period.

The book focuses on the people swept up in the hunt, using letters from naturalists, plant hunters, collectors, and businessmen as primary sources, together with census data, diaries, magazines, and newspapers. Her research has led to unexpected insights. “Amazing things have emerged from the archives,” Bilston said. “The hunt for the lost orchid is a lot more complicated than it might sound. There were a lot of secrets and a lot of concealing the truth done by those involved in the search. You don’t become a plant hunter if you have other options—it’s deathly dangerous.”

Educated at University College London and at Oxford, Bilston teaches a wide range of courses in Victorian literature, including “Victorian Short Fiction,” “Fairy Tales,” “Women and Empire,” and “Victorian Literature and Social Crisis.” She received Trinity’s Thomas Church Brownell Prize for Teaching Excellence in 2017.

Bilston authored The Awkward Age in Women’s Popular Fiction, 1850–1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood (Oxford University Press, 2004) and The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture (Yale University Press, 2019), with the latter named a “Choice Outstanding Academic Title.”