Sarah Bilston is a writer and scholar whose fiction has been published in 9 languages. A Professor of Victorian Literature, she earned her doctorate from the University of Oxford (UK) in 2000 and has taught at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut (USA) since 2005.

As a scholar, I have long been fascinated by people on the margins -- adolescents in my first book, suburbanites in the second. My work bristles with the names of the long-forgotten: Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Julia Frankau, Jane Ellen Panton. In my last book, The Promise of the Suburbs (Yale UP 2019) I explored how women clawed creative space for themselves in the new suburban landscape. Did you know the English suburbs were growing rapidly as early as 1820?

I delight, too, in recovering long-forgotten stories. My new book, The Hunt for the Lost Orchid, covers a remarkable, decades-long quest for a plant. Following the lives of the botanists and plant-hunters who pursued a purple-and-crimson orchid named Cattleya Labiata, the book also examines the exhibitors who displayed it, the nurserymen who sold it, the periodicals that covered it, the local people who sought to protect it from hunters, and the elaborate trade and colonial networks that drove on the cultural obsession known as “orchidelirium” or “orchidmania.”

As a fiction writer, too, I focus on the forgotten, the sidelined, although in quite different ways. Bed Rest, my first novel, was about a young woman whose life is derailed when she's put on bed rest. Sleepless Nights, the sequel, continues the story of a young woman who becomes unexpectedly divorced from her professional life when maternity and parenting throw up a succession of roadblocks. In all my writing, fiction and non-fiction, I am deeply motivated by story-telling, by the pleasures of plot. Or, to put it simply, I hope my work will keep readers turning the page.

The lovely painting on my front page is "Cattleya Labiata,” aka “The Lost Orchid,” from John Lindley’s Collectanea Botanica (Tab 33); with thanks to the RHS Lindley Collections. You can reach me by Email at Sarah DOT bilston AT trincoll DOT com.