Remarkable Creatures

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Remarkable Creatures is the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as that ichthyosaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world. Anning's own contemporaries and their theological preoccupation at the time with whether God's creatures literally endure is quite interesting and some of these same concepts will perplex Teilhard de Chardin nearly one hundred years later. People have been trying to wrap their heads and words about the story of Mary Anning for a long time, including Tracy Chevalier here in Remarkable Creatures.

My Review: A middling book about interesting times and people. Not extraordinarily well, or poorly, written. Not unusual or original in plotting or in, frankly, any way I can think of. Like all of Chevalier's work, a solid, well-made entertainment, about a subject most of us have never given one instant's thought to. Chevalier’s signature talent lies in bringing alive the ordinary day-to-dayness of the past…lovingly evoked.” Remarkable Creatures is a beautifully written book about two remarkable women, Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot. A fictional account based on real-life characters and events, Remarkable Creatures is set in the early 1800’s in the coastal town of Lyme Regis, England. Poor, uneducated Mary Anning and middle-class, London-bred Elizabeth Philpot form what is considered an unconventional friendship, due to their differing social classes, based on their love of fossils and fossil hunting. Despite my extremely limited knowledge in the fields of geology and paleontology, I found this book fascinating.I am kidding, of course, but the thought of Mary Anning as a real-life HP using fossils as portkeys to be transported into a time so different that it might as well just be another world did appeal to me for quite some time.

It's difficult to say more without revealing spoilers. Overall, I would recommend this book to those with an interest in the subjects but am not sure it will win over anyone who isn't interested in taking long walks along the beaches of Lyme Regis looking for fossils day in and day out. How can a twenty-five-year-old middle-class lady think of friendship with a young working girl? Yet even then, there was something about her that drew me in. We shared an interest in fossils, of course, but it was more than that . Even when she was just a girl, Mary led with her eyes, and I wanted to learn how to do so myself." he cliffs and beaches of Lyme Regis, in Dorset on the south coast of England, are fertile hunting grounds for creatures who lived in what were equatorial seas in the early Jurassic period, around 190 million years ago. Here is a look at some of the fossil types Mary Anning discovers in Remarkable Creatures: Mary Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, a town on the southern coast of England, and her passion for fossil collecting began at a young age. Her father, Richard, collected fossils on the Dorset coast to sell to supplement his income as a cabinet maker and help support the financially struggling family. Growing up, Anning accompanied her father on his quests to find fossils. After he died unexpectedly in 1810, Anning continued to collect fossils to help pay off the family’s debts. Remarkable Creatures doesn't have the same sure hand or intricately drawn world as Girl with a Pearl Earring, but Chevalier's own curiosity in her subject can not be doubted as you can see in this Tracy Chevalier ">BBC slide show narrated by Tracy Chevalier and this Barnes and Noble Studio beach walk interview with on Tracy Chevalier (Thanks, Eric, for sending me this link, wonderful interview).GR user Hellie writes in her review that "maybe inventing new characters rather than shoehorning some real life people into it would have worked better". I agree.

I was, in addition, delighted to learn that these characters were actually real people and that this story, even though a work of fiction, might come close to what their lives might have been like. a book of impressive scope. It is not just the story of this young fossil hunter and her rise from indigence and anonymity to renown, but also of how her discoveries were to revolutionise the way people thought about the origins of the world. It is not merely a triumphant tale of female adventure, but a moving reflection on how much intellectual pursuit may cost women in terms of romantic happiness. And in its depiction of the relationship between Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, an educated woman living nearby who also hunted fossils, it is also a celebration of female friendship. The author certainly writes descriptively enough about the coast, the people and the wild weather to make you glad you're not out there digging with them, being lashed by wind and rain. A voyage of discovery, two remarkable women, and an extraordinary time and place enrich this New York Timesbestselling novel by Tracy Chevalier, author of At the Edge of the Orchard and Girl With a Pearl Earring.

New life is formed from extinction and death," wrote Darwin in 1838, in a private notebook. Some 20 years later, he based The Origin of Species on the fact that fossils document a continuum of life forms, demonstrating that millions of species died out as others took their place. A generation earlier, however, when Tracy Chevalier's rough-petticoated heroine was pulling out of cliffs in Lyme Regis the evidence that would go into this insight, nobody wanted to believe that God did not, as one of Chevalier's characters puts it, "plan out what He would do with all of the animals He created". Anning's accomplishments are so big that the interior romantic life Tracy Chevalier imagines for her seems almost sophmoric. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. We owe our knowledge of plesiosaurs and other aquatic beasts of the era to these remarkable women, who hunted for and preserved fossils along England's Dorset coast. That Mary Anning was the more productive of the two and that it was she who found the major finds does not minimize the better-off Miss Philpot's many contributions, both emotional and financial, to the process. God apart, the conventions shaken by these women, simply by who they are and what they are interested in, are the even more rigid ones of class and gender. Giant marine reptiles are not the only remarkable creatures in this book. Chevalier turns a warming spotlight on a friendship cemented by shared obsession and mutual respect across profound class fissures; a friendship between two women who were indirectly responsible for several male careers and ultimately (partially, very indirectly) for Darwin's insights. She also gives it what Darwin himself considered mandatory in a novel, a happy ending - or happy enough.

The greatest fossil hunter ever known was a woman from Lyme Regis. Mary Anning's discoveries were some of the most significant geological finds of all time. They provided evidence that was central to the development of new ideas about the history of the Earth.Mary Anning was one of those women in history who was not appreciated in her time and was given little or no credit for her remarkable talents. She was an uneducated person with a unique talent for finding prehistoric bones of extinct creatures in the cliffs around her home in Lyme. Her friend, and someone who did indeed recognize Mary’s skills, was Elizabeth Philpot, a spinster with higher rank in society and a much higher education level. Together, they contributed greatly to the scientific knowledge that led to an important shift in how men viewed God’s creation and how they viewed themselves within it. Soon after, Mary makes another important discovery: a nearly-intact plesiosaur skeleton in the same region where she found the ichthyosaur. The fossil is sent to London for study, but Elizabeth catches wind that a well-known scientist considers the plesiosaur a hoax. Elizabeth leaves Lyme Regis on her own and goes to London to defend Mary’s reputation and her discoveries. Set against the dramatic landscape of the English coastal town of Lyme-Regis and centers on two female 19th century fossil hunters who make significant discoveries that changed the scientific world forever. The story reveals invisible women in science who were influential but marginalized and whose accomplishments were appropriated by men.