Remarkable Creatures: A Novel
Tracy Chevalier
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0452296722
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A voyage of discovery, two remarkable women, and an extraordinary time and place enrich this New York Times bestselling novel by Tracy Chevalier, author of At the Edge of the Orchard and Girl With a Pearl Earring.
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.
Mary soon finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who shares her passion for scouring the beaches. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty, mutual appreciation, and barely suppressed envy, but ultimately turns out to be their greatest asset.
Remarkable Creatures is a stunning historical novel that follows the story of two extraordinary 19th century fossil hunters who changed the scientific world forever.
Yet?” I would have to explain that the landslip was still blocking it and could not easily be shifted. He seemed not to understand until Mary and Joseph Anning and I took him one day to see the landslip for himself. He was startled and also angry. “No one told me there was this much rock blocking it,” he claimed, stomping at a bubble of clay. “You’ve misled me, Miss Philpot, you and the Annings.” “Indeed no, Lord Henley,” I replied. “Remember, we said it may take up to two years to clear, and if.
Sat at the window with the view towards Golden Cap, but in London I did not feel comfortable prowling about early in my brother’s house. And so I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying not to wake Louise with my fidgeting. Later I sat in the drawing room with my sisters, going over a list of purchases we had made and what was still needed, for we were returning home later that week. We always shopped in London for things we couldn’t get in Lyme: good gloves and hats, well-made boots,.
Head. “She did it herself. I don’t know how she manages it, she’s so haphazard in her hunting. But she finds things.” Mam later told me she’d made a bargain with God: If He showed her where the curies were, she would never again question His judgment, which she had done many times over the years with all the death and debt she had to suffer. “He must have listened,” Mam said, “for I didn’t have to look hard to find ’em. They were just there upon beach, waiting for me to pick them up. I don’t.
Up at me and panted. I had always assumed pets did not like those their owners did not like. Other than that meeting, I was able to avoid her, though I sometimes saw her in the distance, Tray following, on the beach or in town. There was one moment when I was briefly tempted to try to restore our friendship. A few months after our fight, I heard that Mary had discovered a loose jumble of bones, which she pieced together in a speculative fashion, though the specimen was without a skull. I wanted.
Swaying with the shock of being on land again. “I would like a cab, please,” I said to a surprised clerk, interrupting him as he ticked items on a list. He had a mustache that fluttered like a moth over his mouth. “I shall wait here until you fetch me one,” I added, setting down my bag. I did not stick out my chin and sharpen my jaw but gazed steadily at him with my Philpot eyes. He found me a cab. THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY’S OFFICES in Covent Garden were not far from my brother’s house, but.