Mary Anning, Revisited

I just got done listening to another great audiobook: Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. A friend recommended it, and I'm so glad he did. It combines two themes dear to my heart: A Jane Austen set-up and, if you can believe it, the problems of women in science.

This is the story of icthyosaur and plesiosaur discoverer Mary Anning (1799-1847), of whom I wrote a while back. It is more-or-less a novelization of her life. That is to say, most of the events and characters in the book are historical, but the narrative alternates between first person accounts provided by Mary, herself, and her friend Elizabeth Philpot, an expert fossil hunter in her own right.

Elizabeth is a typical Jane Austen heroine: born into the gentry, but with a very meager inheritance of her own. Mary is accustomed to living hand-to-mouth, the daughter of a cabinet maker, who dies highly in debt when she is about 11. The two women met soon after Elizabeth and two of her unmarried sisters moved to Lyme Regis to live cheaply, after the marriage of their brother who held the bulk of the family's wealth. Elizabeth had become interested in fossil hunting and Mary, who was only about 10 at the time, contributed to the family's income by supplying a fossil knick-knack ("curie", short for curiosity) stand that the family ran alongside the cabinet-making business. Elizabeth encouraged her to get an education, and to take a scientific, systematic approach to documenting her finds. Over time, the two became friends, and apparently spent significant time together collecting and studying the fossils. Along the way, they developed connections with, and taught or led a number of the well-known geologists and biologists of the time, including apparently, Cuvier (one of the acknowledged pioneers of paleontology).

Of course, scientific expertise is no excuse for gender, and though their contributions were first rate, neither Mary nor Elizabeth were recognized by any of the scientific establishment, on anything but a personal level. They were friends with the "great men", they sold fossils to the men, they corresponded with the men on scientific matters, they led the men on fossil hunts, but they could not publish papers or attend scientific meetings. And Mary had the double whammy of being of a different social class, as well, and living on the brink of starvation for much of her life.

The story reads like a pure novel. The narrative is wonderful, as are the voices of the two women. (I will say, too, that as audiobooks go, this was a lovely one, with two readers who provide excellent voices of their own.) The historical events are woven in nicely with the plot. And throughout you feel all of the pathos of the difficulties faced by two serious scientists in the context of their gender, poverty and class.

My informant tells me that The Lady and the Unicorn is good, too. It's on my queue.