Mary Anning's voice is working-class and irreverent - she likes to give her fossils cutesy nicknames like "curies" and "ichies." Elizabeth Philpot is spinsterish and irritable. The novel unfolds in alternating first-person accounts, Mary Anning's version of events corroborated (or contradicted) by the reflections of her more educated friend, Elizabeth Philpot. Chevalier takes us directly inside Mary Anning's mind, using intimate first-person confessions to construct a vision of how the junior scientist grew up, and to illustrate just how fraught her relationship with nineteenth-century science really was. Mary Anning, her subject in Remarkable Creatures, is a rock star to the natural history museum set, a feminist hero dangled before little girls to get them excited about science and to prove that paleontology is not just for boys. Exploiting a beloved historical icon in fiction is risky business, but Chevalier dives in with gusto. Tracy Chevalier, of Girl with a Pearl Earring fame, has shown before that she is not afraid to tackle popular material.
A new historical novel from the author of Girl With a Pearl Earring
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