Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier’s stunning novel of how one woman’s gift transcends class and gender to lead to some of the most important discoveries of the nineteenth century.

A revealing portrait of the intricate and resilient nature of female friendship.

In the early nineteenth century, a windswept beach along the English coast brims with fossils for those with the eye…

From the moment she’s struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is marked for greatness. When she uncovers unknown dinosaur fossils in the cliffs near her home, she sets the scientific world alight, challenging ideas about the world’s creation and stimulating debate over our origins. In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary is soon reduced to a serving role, facing prejudice from the academic community, vicious gossip from neighbours, and the heartbreak of forbidden love. Even nature is a threat, throwing bitter cold, storms, and landslips at her.

Luckily, Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly, intelligent Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who is also fossil-obsessed. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty and barely suppressed envy. Despite their differences in age and background, Mary and Elizabeth discover that, in struggling for recognition, friendship is their strongest weapon.

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Mary Anning is an historical figure that I find absolutely fascinating. I can’t believe that I wasn’t aware of this novel until recently, given that it was first published in 2009.

Remarkable Creatures covers Mary Anning’s life, first introducing her to the reader as a young girl prior to making the discoveries that will eventually make her name, even if the recognition for her work and her contribution to palaeontology and scientific thinking at the time comes much later than it should have done.  What’s clear from the beginning is that she has a love of fossils without fully appreciating what they are at first, and a knack for finding them along Dorset’s Jurassic Coast where she lives.  Selling these fossils – mostly ammonites initially – brings in a little extra money for the family who are living on the breadline.  Her first major discovery – an ichthyosaur, although they didn’t call it that initially, believing it to be some kind of crocodile – sees things start to change in Mary’s life.

While focussing on Mary Anning, the novel is predominantly narrated by her friend, Elizabeth Philpot, alternating between the two perspectives, but giving Elizabeth’s point of view significantly more page time.  While this might seem to be a strange choice in the context of the novel, I think that it works well as we get to see Mary through the eyes of another which perhaps gives a more honest view of Mary and her actions.  Elizabeth is also older, and so she is able to give a more worldly view and broader context than an individual who is barely literate when we meet her, and who has never left the town in which she was born and raised.

Elizabeth is quite a different individual to Mary, and while it’s inevitable that they meet, it’s surprising that they become friends.  Elizabeth is older than Mary by several years and from a different societal class at a time when such things were considered important.  Elizabeth and her sisters never marry and while financially dependent upon their brother, they can live quite comfortably and pursue their own interests without needing to work, provided that they are relatively cautious with their money.  Elizabeth’s interests lead her to natural history and, much to the horror of those around her, she’s not afraid to go out and get her hands dirty, and it’s this shared passion for fossil hunting that brings Mary and Elizabeth together. 

I love the descriptions of Lyme Regis and the Jurassic coastline where Mary lives.  She and Elizabeth spend so much of their time out on that coastline in all weathers and it’s easy to imagine being out there with them.  I also enjoyed the descriptions of their finds – the frisson of excitement at finding a particularly well-preserved specimen, and the joy of successfully extracting it from the rock.  Chevalier does also capture the dangers inherent in their hobby with landslides revealing hidden gems – including Mary’s first ichthyosaur – and yet also holding the potential to bury an unsuspecting fossil hunter.  And being on the coast, one must pay attention to the tides, lest one’s route home no longer be accessible… something that Mary seems more naturally attuned to than Elizabeth.

Chevalier highlights the ways in which Mary was taken advantage of and whose work was often credited to others.  Her ichthyosaur generates some much-needed income for the family, and yet the buyer sells it on – no doubt for a profit – taking the credit for the discovery so painstakingly worked upon by Mary.  While Mary does become known as an expert fossil hunter whose advice is regularly sought, it’s a struggle to get the credit and recognition that she deserves (and as a lady, she is never permitted to join the Geological Society of London), something that seems to have been fully acknowledged only recently.  It was during this period (the early 18^th century) that scientific thinking began to change as the possibility of animal extinction – a radical and heretical thought for the time – was first considered a possibility, paving the way for Darwin, and Mary’s discoveries contributed to that thinking. 

If I have any slight niggle with the novel, it’s that Mary still seems to have very little agency.  Her mother and Elizabeth handle the negotiations and sales on Mary’s behalf, and even as she grows older, she seems to have very little power or control.  This may well be an accurate reflection of Mary’s experiences. Elizabeth would have had better contacts and access than Mary simply for being from London and not one of the working class, and so that support may well have been necessary.  And Elizabeth, with a higher level of education, would have had more knowledge and experience – and indeed back up, in the form of her brother – in undertaking some of these sales, but I personally would have loved for Mary to have a little control, even if it was only in this fictionalised account of her life.

That said, Remarkable Creatures is a fantastic novel highlighting the life and times of someone whose contributions were unrecognised and undervalued for so long.  It is fiction, and as Chevalier admits in her author’s note, she has extrapolated and invented in places out of necessity, but the novel feels true to the period and to what is known of Mary Anning and her life.  Highly recommended for those looking to learn more about this fascinating individual.