Curiosity
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning novelist Joan Thomas blends fact and fiction, passion and science in this stunning novel set in 19th-century Lyme Regis, England—the seaside town that is the setting of both The French Lieutenant's Woman and Jane Austen's Persuasion.
More than 40 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, 12-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker's daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, and spent a year chipping it from the soft cliffs near Lyme Regis. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this incredible woman, perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day.
Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent back in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an extraordinary discovery—a giant fossil—he meets a young woman unlike anyone he has ever met . . .
Customer Reviews
Mary Anning's is a fascinating tale.
I read this in the wake of Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures which is another fictionalised account of Mary Anning's life (Mary Anning was an important figure in early British fossil hunting. Based in Lyme Regis in the early 19th century, her contribution was not recognised until the 1930s). This is a far richer account of the period than Remarkable Creatures albeit it focuses on a suspected love affair while Chevalier highlights the camaraderie between Anning and another local spinster Elizabeth Philpott. Nonetheless both books reveal the challenges such fossil finds posed for the Church and the accepted orthodoxy of Earth's origins as well as the society's patriarchy that stifled women in both domestic and scientific realms. The appeal of these two accounts is how Mary Anning was able to hone her skills and forge a living in an emerging scientific field that would fundamentally change the way we understood our world.