Some websites with some additional information on Mary Anning, Lyme Regis, and fossils:
Lyme Regis Museum -- fossils
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Fossil Hunter Mary Anning celebrated in Lyme Regis
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Review of the book:
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'Where archeology and reality meet" discusses Elizabeth Philpott:
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….. The Lyme Regis coastline is marked by high, crumbly cliffs along the shore which, as they extend east and west from Lyme Regis, expose nearly the full array of rock formations of the Mesozoic Era, the some 200 million years of the Age of the Dinosaurs, beginning about 251 million years ago. This area was a sea at this juncture. Some of the names of the formations laid down at the time and now exposed here are delightful. Anning spent a significant amount of time searching material from the Jurassic Period’s Blue Lias Formation, a mix of limestone and shale which, apparently, was named for the bluish color of the rock and, either the pronunciation of “layers” in the local dialect or, as Emling would have it, the Gaelic word for “flat stone”. The Charmouth Mudstone Formation is another key Jurassic formation, subdivided into various layers including the Shales-with-Beef Member made of mudstone and given its named because it includes a series of thin beds with the appearance of sliced beef. The 150 foot high cliffs to the east of town are known as Black Ven. (Discovering Fossils, on the web, provides a great introduction to the geological formations in the area.).....
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hints for fossil hunting around Lyme Regis:
Collecting fossils
Fossils collected on the beach at Charmouth- The best, and safest, place to look for fossils is on the beach where the sea has washed away soft clay and mud.
- Do not hammer into the cliffs, fossil features or rocky ledges.
- Keep collecting to a minimum. Avoid removing in situ fossils, rocks or minerals.
- The collection of specimens should be restricted to those places where there is a plentiful supply.
- Only collect what you need – leave something for others.
- Never collect from walls or buildings. Take care not to undermine fences, bridges or other structures.
- Be considerate and don’t leave a site in an unsightly or dangerous condition.
- Some landowners do not wish people to collect – please observe notices.
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Author’s home page:
Author US Tour in March for new book : At the Edge of the Orchard
23 March, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 7pm
24 March, Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA, 12 noon
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Interview with Tracy Chevalier
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…...My latest book, Remarkable Creatures, is particularly about a woman named Mary Anning, the fossil hunter, but I knew I wanted there to be a different perspective. Mary was not educated, she didn’t travel, and I felt like we as twenty-first-century readers need a broader view. Also, in religious terms, there were people who saw fossils as a challenge to their ideas about religion, and I wanted to be able to present both sides: people who felt, God created fossils and it didn’t affect their religious beliefs; and those whom fossils did challenge. So I wanted two sides of the argument, and I found out that Mary had this friend who was a middle-class woman twenty years her senior, named Elizabeth Philpot. It made perfect sense to have the two of them tell the story and get a more complete picture. So it comes organically out of the story, but you don’t always know right away. Sometimes it takes a lot of fiddling around, or rewriting a whole draft from a different point of view.
You’ve written about real characters before, such as Johannes Vermeer and William Blake, but they were tangential characters in those novels. Mary Anning is very much center stage in Remarkable Creatures. Was it a constraint to write about a real person, about whom quite a lot is known?
Mary Anning, prior to 1842
It was both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that you don’t have to make it up, which is great, because my imagination is limited! I had the skeleton structure of her life, where she was at more or less any given period; she didn’t move around much, and lived in Lyme Regis all her life. There were highlights of her life, so the peaks are of the story are built in, and that’s great. The disadvantage is that those peaks don’t always happen the way we as readers would like them to. I had to fudge the chronology a little bit, more in this book than in other books.
Vermeer and Blake are both central to the concept of their books, but they’re not the main players, and it’s much easier to make up stuff around them without it actually affecting their chronology. Whereas with Mary Anning, between two important things that happened there’d be a three year gap. And I’d go, “Oh, three years? This is outrageous!” The thing is, back then people had very different lives from us. She used to go out on the beach every day, and the same things would happen year after year. Our lives are much more varied than that, and we’re used to reading about people with more varied lives.
Day after day isn’t great for narrative. So in the first draft I kept all the dates, then I put it all together and thought, oh, this drags a bit—who needs to know that this happened and then there were three or four years before that happened? And I thought: why don’t I just take off the dates? It was an incredible liberation. All my other books have dates that separate the sections, and it’s very clear when things take place. This time I’ve stripped them all out, and it was a great relief. There are three dates that are mentioned, one on which an auction takes place, one when she finds anichthyosaur, and one when she finds a plesiosaur. I think those are the only specific dates in the book. Everything else is kind of a mishmash. Readers don’t mind it at all—no one’s said to me, “I don’t get this, you know that three years have gone by there?” Once you look at it in a different way and allow yourself that leeway, it makes it a lot easier.
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How do you use your research, which might be quite dry and academic, and bring it to life the way you do? What’s the mechanism for taking facts and using them to recreate the past in a way that’s vibrant?
I put the story first, and the characters. The history always has to be secondary. I don’t want to be a teacher, I want to be a storyteller, and I want to prop up what I write with something that’s going to give it validity. That’s where the history comes in. I wasn’t a history major; I wasn’t that interested in history until I was in my thirties, and even now, I’m only interested in history when I’m writing a book. I’m interested in that era and I want to read everything about it, find out about it, sort through all the junk to find the little glittering things that are going to work. That sorting gives me the confidence to set something during a particular period. It makes me know, when a character walks into the house, what the dimensions of the rooms are, what she’s wearing, what she’ll do when she comes in—does she take off a hat and gloves, what kind of shoes does she have, what’s she going to eat? When I’m writing books I tend to see history not as about who’s prime minister or president at the time, but more about what people’s everyday lives were like, and how they differed from ours.
You’ve talked before about how you like to get your hands dirty when you’re researching a novel. You took painting classes when you were writing Girl with a Pearl Earring and you went to a tapestry studio for The Lady and the Unicorn. Apart from looking on the beach for fossils, what did you do forRemarkable Creatures?
That’s pretty much what I did! Mary and Elizabeth were very interested in fossils, that was their obsession, and so I had to spend a long time on the beach, looking. It requires a lot of patience, a way of being that doesn’t happen just going out once. I had to go a lot. I’ve got a lot better at finding things than I was at the beginning, because of all the time I put in. And there’s a whole gallery in the Natural History museum of London which is full of the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that Mary Anning found. I spent a lot of time looking at them. Other than that, Elizabeth Philpot collected a lot of fossil fish, and when she died her nephew gave her collection to the Natural History Museum in Oxford. They have her stuff in all these big trays in back rooms, and I spent a very happy day pulling them out and looking. Some of the labels are in her hand, they’re original, and it was so amazing to hold these things, to hold what she found, prepared and cleaned, and studied, and wrote the labels for. And there’s the label, still there. I always love the hands-on, not just doing but also feeling. It’s like a talisman to touch something that my characters have touched. William Blake had a notebook that he used to write his poems in. They have it at the British Library, and when I was researching Burning Bright, I managed to talk them into letting me look at it, and hold it, and turn pages. It was so amazing.
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Remarkable Creatures hangs on the unusual friendship between Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot. What appealed to you about portraying a close friendship between two women?
Image Credit: Flickr
I think the best books are about a relationship that changes over time. Somebody described the novel once as normal-change-new normal. People’s lives are measured by their relationships with other people. Maybe because I’m not particularly romantic, I don’t write in general about romantic relationships, although Vermeer’s relationship with Griet was certainly romantic. I’m more interested in the day-to-day relationships that we have. With Mary and Elizabeth it was just so unusual, because Mary was a working-class woman and Elizabeth was a middle-class woman, and that’s a huge difference, then and now too—you know we sort of say everything’s wide open, but honestly are there many people who cross paths? Do we have any working class friends? Not really. So that’s still there, though it’s less rigid, less codified in society now than it was.
Then it was very strict. And also, Elizabeth was 20 years older than Mary, which was unusual. But they were good friends. Lyme Regis was isolated enough that you could get away with unconventional behavior. Also, these women did not marry. They did not have the romantic relationships I would have written about. There’s a bit of it but very little. They had each other and that had to suffice—it more than sufficed, I think. They got on very well, bonded by this love of fossils. I guess I’m interested in more than the romantic template we’ve grown up with. Jane Austen wrote about romantic relationships—also about family relationships and sisters—but really in the end, Elizabeth Bennett ends up with Mr. Darcy and that’s the thing that matters. I thought, that’s all very well in a novel, but in real life that’s not always how it happens. And I wanted to know, what happens to the women who don’t get married? This is what happens to them: they have the sort of friendships that sustain them.
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Read alikes from NoveList
Readalikes
1. The edge of the Earth Schwarz, Christina Reason: Though it lacks the dark psychological elements of The Edge of the Earth, Remarkable Creatures is another elegantly written, atmospheric historical fiction novel featuring a strong, complex female protagonist within a vividly rendered coastal community in the late 19th century. Derek Keyser
2. The French lieutenant's woman Fowles, John, Reason: If you liked the setting and historical detail of Remarkable Creatures and would like to read another book involving fossils in Lyme Regis, albeit with a romantic twist, you may want to read The French Lieutenant's Woman. Rebecca Sigmon
3. Chocolat Harris, Joanne, 1964 Reason: Remarkable Creatures and Chocolat are richly evocative, lyrical novels about women who find themselves exiles in their small European hometowns as their unmarried status and unusual hobbies provoke gossip and ill will. Rebecca Sigmon
4. Pictures from an expedition Smith, Diane, Reason: While the tone and writing style is different, Remarkable Creatures and Pictures From an Expedition are detailed historical fiction about women dinosaur fossil hunters. Historically, these are unusual women because of their archaeological interest and knowledge. Rebecca Sigmon
