Remarkable Creatures

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the benefits of belonging to book clubs is reading books you’ve never heard of and finding ones that are wonderful like Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. The book is historical fiction based on the real life of Mary Anning, a poor girl with very little education, who with her father and brother looked for fossils to sell in Lyme Regis on the southern shore of England. Her father was a cabinet maker, and the fossils they found brought in more money for their impoverished family. She was born in 1799 and lived until 1847 when she died of breast cancer.

A photo of Mary Anning

From the blurb on the back of the book: “From the moment she’s struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is different. Though poor and uneducated, she learns on the windswept fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast that she has a unique gift.” (In the book, she claims to have “‘the eye’” because she sees fossils both on the beach and in the cliffs that others overlook.)

Mary' helped other fossil hunters & scientists who came.

“When she uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious community on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight with both admiration and controversy.”  The priests and bishops refused to believe these fossils were from further back than six thousand years ago, and yet scientists knew the rocks dated back much further than that.

Too bad there was an age limit on marriage.

Another main character in the book is Elizabeth Philpot, one of three spinster sisters from the middle-class, a much higher level than the very poor Anning family. Although, her sisters and brother frowned on her searching for fossils along the shore, she was fascinated by fish fossils and collected them. She knew she was too old to marry, because in those days, one was considered already beyond marrying age by the time they were in their mid-twenties. So she became unique in her own way ignoring what other people thought. Elizabeth met and befriended Mary Anning as they searched for fossils. She outlived Mary dying at the age of 1857 at the age of seventy-eight.

The kind of fossils Elizabeth saved.

As friends Elizabeth helped Mary get recognized by scientists even though many prominent scientists, like the famous French anatomist Georges Cuvier, refused to believe any woman, especially a poor barely literate young woman could discover fossils of previously undiscovered creatures from what would become known as the Jurassic period.

I have no idea what kind of creature this is.

Mary found the first specimen of ichthyosaurus sometime between 1809 and 1811 when she was only ten to twelve years old. Perhaps her most important find, from a scientific point of view, was the first plesiosaur.

After Mary found fossils many flocked to look for them.

“In 1824, Lady Harriet Sivester, the widow of the former Recorder of the City of London, wrote in her diary after visiting Mary Anning,  “. . .the extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved . . . It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour – that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.”

Mary Anning's & Elizabeth's town of Lyne Regis.

Although the book is historical fiction, Tracy Chevalier created the conversations and thoughts of the characters it made the characters come alive. The reader can only believe that’s what they could have said and thought, and facts about the real characters would back this up. Also, although it wasn’t in the book, Jane Austin visited the town and had the Anning father make something for her. Whether or not she talked with Mary Anning is unknown. The fictional part didn’t cover her later life when she became a well-known authority, but more the earlier years when no one wanted to give a girl or woman credit for being a scientist.

Mary looking at her finds in a museum.

When my book club members discussed this book last week, everyone found it quite interesting and all were glad they had read it, and if they hadn’t quite finished it, they were going home to finish the book.  As for me, I was interested enough to do some more research on Mary Anning.

Tracy Chevalier wrote a postscript at the back of the book in which she gave more facts about Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, and other characters that really existed. In three and a half pages she wrote about what happened to the characters after the book ended.

The excerpt from Lady Silvester’s diary was found at: www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/anning.html/

At the end of the article, it refers to various biographies of Mary Anning, who lived from 1799 to 1847) I highly recommend this book.

Museum visitors today looking at her finds.

Have you ever heard of Mary Anning?

What other woman have you admired that had to fight because she was a woman in what was considered a man’s world?