Forbidden fruit

ELAINE di Rollo is squinting up at a palm tree in the glasshouses of Edinburgh's Botanic Garden, its lush canopy pressed close up against the roof. This lush, fertile environment inspired her brilliant debut novel, The Peachgrowers' Almanac, a generous, rollicking read about daredevil twin sisters in England and India during 1857.

"I like the idea that it just keeps going until it reaches the roof," says the small and sprightly di Rollo, who has been coming here for more than 20 years to soak up "the hissing steaminess" of the Victorian Glasshouses. "I like the idea of it eventually bursting out, the sweatiness of the place. It fits with the idea of women being trapped – the glass ceiling. There's this feeling of everything panting, and it makes for such a passionate atmosphere."

As indeed it does in her assured, very funny debut; one of the best I've read this year. As soon as we step into this warm, green place I'm transported to the gothic, outlandish world of the book. A tale of Victorian progress, imperialism and arrogance, it harks back to the loving pastiche of Angela Carter and, more recently, the camp Victoriana of Susanna Clarke and Michel Faber. Di Rollo's book follows the fate of Alice, a strong-willed botanist and curator of her father's bizarre miscellany of artefacts – inspired by the Burrell collection – ferreted away in an English country house.

While her sister, Lilian, has been driven from home in disgrace and banished to India, Alice seeks refuge from her father and the malevolent Doctor Cattermole in the "warm, clean broth" of the house's tropical conservatory. It's a richly evoked and metaphorical place in the novel, with its "desperate leaves pressed against the glass ceiling like hands" and the "obscene glimpses of hairy wrists and knuckles of root".

"I knew I wanted to put all this into my book," continues di Rollo, who is originally from Lancashire but moved to Edinburgh 22 years ago to study history and complete a PhD in the social history of medicine. Much of her research about the medical treatment of Victorian women, particularly the notion of them becoming hermaphrodites if they were permitted too much independent thought, elbowed its way into her novel. "Some of the views about becoming unsexed through education, their organs withering away, I just took from the journals of the time. Female circumcision wasn't widespread but it did happen. I thought, I can't leave this extraordinary information gathering dust in a PhD that people won't read. So I put it in my novel."

We move on to the orchid house. In the book we discover that the name of these delicate, feminine flowers is derived from the Greek word for testicle. "Some of these big pods and seeds nestling into the earth are all shiny and moist, like sticky phalluses rising up," says di Rollo. "It's sexual stuff." She e-mailed the Botanic Garden looking for sexual plant names for the book. "I got this great flood of messages back," she grins. "One of the only sciences Victorian women were permitted to do was botany, which ironically is incredibly sensual. I thought the prudery of the Victorians with the raciness of botany made for a great contrast."

This is only half the story. Lilian, meanwhile, is in India and her fate is equally compelling. Married off to a ineffectual missionary, Lilian shocks the other memsahibs by becoming an Indophile, wearing saris and learning to play the sitar. Di Rollo based her on Fanny Parkes, the wife of an East India Company administrator, whose journals were discovered by William Dalrymple. "She would ride across the country alone, ate Indian food and criticised the British for their lack of tolerance," says di Rollo. "The Victorians may have been ghastly imperialists but some really pushed the limits, too, with their spirit of enquiry."

She wrote the book over three long years, juggling it with a full-time job lecturing in marketing, having two children, and writing on her knees because of a slipped disc so painful she couldn't stand up straight for two years. Unbelievably, she is now on her third novel. "I used to write on the bus, waiting for the bus, on the back of an envelope," she says. "Once I started I couldn't stop. I actually wrote this book and submitted it under a false name because I thought it was so embarrassing to want to be a writer." Thankfully she changed her mind: "I finally reached the point where I thought, screw it: I love doing this."

The Peachgrowers' Almanac by Elaine di Rollo, Chatto & Windus, £16.99