Remarkable Creatures

This is one of my favourite novels about the imagined life of the 19th Century fossil enthusiast, Mary Anning.

Though poor and uneducated, Mary had a passion for dinosaur fossils, scouring the windswept Jurassic coast near Lyme Regis. She found fossils nobody else could, making discoveries that shook the scientific world. But science in the past was an almost entirely male-dominated arena, and Mary’s finds were effectively stolen from her, and she was ignored and forgotten in the scientific community.

Mary’s story is one of female hardship, endurance, and tenacity, and her contribution to our scientific knowledge deserves… show more.

Do you ever read a book that seems so perfect you wonder if someone concocted it in a lab just for you?

Remarkable Creatures is about two real nineteenth-century paleontologists, Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, the same duo that inspired the movie Ammonite (although the romantic relationship portrayed in the movie is, alas, fiction!). Mary Anning has enjoyed something of a renaissance in popular history lately, but Elizabeth, her lifelong best friend and scientific confidant, is less well-known.

I loved the way Chevalier portrayed Mary and Elizabeth’s passion and determination to pursue science in a time when female scientists were… show more.

Mary Anning was a gifted fossil hunter. She found evidence of previously undiscovered giant marine reptiles in the Lyme Regis cliffs. But being uneducated, she was ignored by the scientific male-dominated world of the 19th century.

The novel, based on a true story, describes Mary’s battle to be believed. She developed a supportive relationship with Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class woman who helped her negotiate the challenges she faced.

I found this beautifully paced story inspiring. Despite the era with its fixed ideas of gender and class, Mary had the temerity and dogged self-belief to survive and succeed.

The Original Sisters book contains a very brief description of Mary Anning, and I was keen to find out more about her. Our book club this fall fortunately discussed Chevalier’s historical novel about Anning and her friend Elizabeth Philpott, and it was a mind-breaker. It’s Charles Darwin, not Anning, who gets the credit for our understanding of evolution, but I’m convinced that Anning must get at least some of the recognition. Because she was a woman, Anning was barred from joining the National Geological Society of London, but Darwin was fascinated by her discoveries and read her findings avidly. Chevalier’s… show more.

I am a great fan of Tracey Chevalier’s work, and this is probably my favourite of her novels - a book about fossil hunting, and friendship. The kind of friendship, between two women, that cuts across age and class. It also shapes the era in which they live. This novel shows how the ripples from individual acts and lives spread far and wide, even when those individuals remain relatively unknown. Mary Anning and Elizbeth Philpot form an unlikely, spiky friendship that changes history. One of the best qualities of historical fiction is that it can illuminate both the small and… show more.