Remarkable Creatures

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The book is not just an intresting feature about the ideas about the world's creation and our origins in that time, but it is about friendship between two very diffrent women and how they fight for recognition in a scientific world, dominated by men. Apart from that, if anybody is intrested in fossils and geology, this is a nice way to start. But for me the most intriguing aspect of the story, which was set primarily in Lymes Regis, England in the first quarter of the 19th century, was the capturing of that moment in time when there is a shift in the questions that scientists and other intellectuals are asking. Are these fossils animals that are no longer living? If so, why, and does that mean that God, their creator, is not perfect? Do the fossils that are being discovered mean that the earth is much older than currently thought? You get to experience these transformative thoughts that frighten people and eventually change the world in which we live. 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.

I wish that Remarkable Creatures were, frankly, a little more remarkable. Except for just a few moments of excitement and tension... the plot moves like a careful geologist on the beach, slow and steady, turning over lots of the same things again and again. Yes, it can be rewarding, but you have to be patient and willing to look hard. Here's an animated sequence my friend Jill found of dialog from the historical novel Curiosity, by Joan Thomas, contrasting the perspectives of a typical 19th century Englishman with French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier who doubted Anning's findings. Absorbing…[Chevalier] creates a world reminiscent of a Vermeer interior: suspended in a particular moment, it transcends its time and place.”

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. Until this story, I had no idea who Mary Anning or Elizabeth Philpot were and how important their work was in the discovery of prehistoric creatures. Their discoveries at the beginning of the 19th century came at the time when many tried to explain or reconcile geology with their religious beliefs when very idea of extinction was anathema because it suggested that God was imperfect. What are these creatures and why don’t they still exist? Is it possible that God made a mistake with these animals? Take this exchange between Reverend Jones and Elizabeth Philpot: In the end, it is the usual suspect, jealousy, that ends the friendship across a generation and a class divide. Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot fall in love with the same man. It leads to the eruption of their other jealousies, of course, and the many things we think but never say come out of each woman's mouth. What is even more astonishing is that Mary Anning had little education and spent most of her early years in abject poverty. 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."

This a book of historical fiction, so we do know that Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpott lived off the coast of England and searched for fossils in the early 1800s. Their accomplishments are well documented. What is conjecture is the story of the difficulties they faced at a time when women needed a man to communicate with the world. It is the story of following your passion and the redemptive power of friendship. These women could never have known that they were challenging the accepted science and religion of the time. The book talks about some of the conflicts they faced as they discovered things that contradicted their fundamentalist religion. I now know more than I ever expected to about fossil-collecting by English women during the Regency period. There are worse fates.I was mildly irked by one plotline that seemed like a modern imposition on Regency society (and there's nothing in actual history to support this part of the story): Mary and Elizabeth both fall for the same older guy. Mary hopes that he'll ask her to marry him, but eventually realizes that's simply not going to happen. After she figures that out, she decides to sleep with him just one time, just for the experience of having sex, because she's realized she's not likely to ever marry him or anyone else. It just seemed like late 20th century kind of thinking to me. If she'd slept with the guy hoping to get him to marry her, that would have made more sense for those times. Plus the guy is kind of a cad, but that's a whole 'nother story.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. The story that Chevalier creates of the friendship of the two women is truly magnificent. The difference in age and class causes many obstacles for women to communicate and there are major rifts between them, which left me wondering how they would cope, how they would resolve their differences. And in the end, whether they would manage to be able to rely on each other when everything they had worked for was put at risk and depended on their friendship. Therein its charm. Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot weren't the women of Jane Austen's novels, and they weren't subjected to the same constraints as those women were. They lived in poverty whether genteel or grinding, and they followed their own interests instead of doing what was thought to be necessary to get a husband. Chevalier points up the ways in which this freedom made the women best able to pursue the passions each might never have known had she been a mother and a wife. As a young woman growing up poor in the early 19th century, Anning received little formal education. Despite this, she continued to make discoveries that helped solidify several pillars of our understanding of science and geology, like the theory of extinction. Anning’s instrumental work included her discovery of coprolites (fossilized feces), which began conversations about what animals, like dinosaurs, ate. In 1823, Anning uncovered the first intact skeleton of a Plesiosaur, a nine-foot long reptile-like creature, which ushered in so much attention from geologists that it was heavily discussed at the Geological Society of London the following year. Ammonite Tells a Partly True Story of Two Women Pursuing Love and Science. Here's What's Fact and What's Fiction

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. 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. From the New York Times bestselling novelist, a stunning historical novel that follows the story of Mary Anning andElizabeth Philpot, two extraordinary 19th century fossil hunters who changed the scientific world forever.In the first place, I wanted to read this book because it handled about Mary Anning and her pioneering role in discovering and her knowledge in finding fossiles and some pre-historic fossilised animal skeletons in the nearness of Lyme Regis, England. It gave a good and quite truthful (however romanticised) release about her life, her friendship with Elizabeth Philpot and her findings. It also gave a good picture of the knowledge of geologists about fossils and fossilised skeletons. How much we have accepted nowadays that life developed in many stages and that some pre-historic sorts are extinct, it wasn't evident in early 19 th century. The work of Mary Anning played an important part in discovering them and led to a important discourse in palaeontology. Chevalier is not the only author to speculate about Anning's past and I will look forward to learning more about her life and times both in historical fiction,as well as from a variety of biographies. 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. More fact-based historical fiction from Chevalier ( Burning Bright, 2007, etc.): the vivid, rewarding tale of 19th-century fossil hunter Mary Anning. This historical novel is somewhat loosely based on several people who actually lived, and either hunted or collected fossils, in England in the early 1800s. It alternates between the viewpoints of Elizabeth Philpot, a genteel spinster in reduced circumstances who moves to Lyme Regis by the sea (a hotbed for fossil-hunters) and discovers a passion for fossils, and Mary Anning, the daughter of a destitute cabinetmaker's widow, who supplements the family income by finding and selling fossils. Despite their differences in age and social status, the two form a friendship based on their mutual fascination with fossils that lasts for many years and survives some ups and downs.

Chevalier does a fine job of smoothly incorporating many historical figures into the narrative, though her Author's Note mentions that she had to condense the timeline quite a bit and that she also took some artistic license with some of the relationships. I must say that I was not particularly fond of her interpretation of the course of the relationship with Mary and Col. Birch. I was also frustrated with some of the changes in the friendship between Mary and Elizabeth--I am not sure whether this was true or artistic license, but I certainly hope that these otherwise thoughtful women would not be quite so silly and petty. Tracy Chevalier's novel about Mary Anning is also about another woman--the genteel older woman Elizabeth Philpot. Despite the class and age differences between the two women, they became close friends as they shared their passion for collecting fossils. So this is not only a story about a woman who made invaluable contributions to science, but a story about the bond of friendship between two women. BA in English, Oberlin College, Ohio, 1984. No one was surprised that I went there; I was made for such a progressive, liberal place. I'd rather give it 2 and a half stars. It was an interesting way to learn about the fossils discovered by Mary Anning and her relationship with Elizabeth Philpott, but for me, the fictionalised account of what might have been the rest of their story wasn't equally interesting. On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary Anning learns that she has a unique gift: “the eye” to spot fossils no one else can see. 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. After enduring bitter cold, thunderstorms, and landslips, her challenges only grow when she falls in love with an impossible man.

Anning, her Lyme seashore, and the scientific discourse of her time are all fascinating topics for consideration. In creating the yin/yang of her dual protagonists Chevalier stretches the boundaries of historical fiction a little too far for me. It is a stunning story, compassionately reimagined. In real life Chevalier's heroine, Mary Anning, was the greatest fossil-hunter ever. Her father was a not-very-successful cabinet-maker whom Jane Austen once asked to mend a chest, but his estimate was too high. Austen looked elsewhere, never knowing that the artisan she briefly met was teaching his gifted daughter to find the "curies", the fossil curiosities sold to Lyme tourists like herself. Anyway, spurned by the move to Lyme Regis, Elizabeth becomes a fossil collector, too, and befriends Mary.