As a researcher, I’ve long been fascinated by people on the margins -- adolescents in my first book, suburbanites in the second, migrant plant-hunters in the third. My work bristles with the names of the long-forgotten: Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Julia Frankau, Jane Ellen Panton, William Digance. In my second nonfiction book, The Promise of the Suburbs, 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 love to dig up long-forgotten stories. My new book, 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 locals who sourced it, and the elaborate trade and colonial networks that drove on the cultural obsession known as “orchidelirium” or “orchidmania.” (I won two awards from the NEH to support my research.)

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 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. I’d love to hear from you!