remarkable creatures tracy chevalier summary

It’s an alternative to Jane Austen.”Ī: “I’m finally setting a novel in the States. In a way it’s also an exploration of what women in that period, if they didn’t marry, what did they do instead. The two women in ‘Remarkable Creatures’ never married. We have this stereotype of Jane Austen novels where the women at the end find the man they marry.

Q: Why did you place such emphasis on female friendship in “Remarkable Creatures?”Ī: “I wanted it (to be) as much a book about the people, and about what women can get from friendship. “But what’s harder about what I do, I have to learn the day-to-day social details, Even if you weren’t a banker, you’d probably know what kind of clothes they wear, or places they go to.

If you’re setting a novel in the banking world of New York, unless you are a banker, you’d have to do research. Sometimes I envy contemporary writers, though perhaps that’s unfair as all novelists have to do some research. Q: How much research goes into your novels?Ī: “A lot. I’m not a scientist at all, so that was quite challenging, but I enjoy a challenge. That also drew me, that it was such an unusual period of time, a breakout period for science. people started questioning these beliefs. “(After) the discoveries Mary made, and other discoveries.

You could say everybody in the 19th century had creationist thinking about the world and saw the bible as a literal history of the world and it hadn’t occurred to people to question that. But in this case, it’s the fossil that is representing a challenge to an old way of thinking. Q: You seem to be drawn to the stories of working class women at unique points in history?Ī: “I suppose it is a way to tell a familiar story through a different set of eyes. “And the fact she was struck by lightning as a baby, I just though that’s a great way to start a novel, so I decided right then and there that I was going to write a novel about her.” The fact she was working class and didn’t start out as a scientist but she was collecting fossils to sell them to make a living and fell into this scientific discovery. There was a display about Mary Anning and she just struck me as an unusual person.

“This time it was at a dinosaur museum in Dorset.

Remarkable creatures tracy chevalier summary