REMARKABLE CREATURES

Tracy Chevalier (HarperCollins, £15.99)

Remarkable Creatures is an enthralling scientific romance that captures a time when the world was being turned upside down by new ideas of science and religion.

It was also a time when many novels were beginning to feature intelligent and decisive female characters yearning for independence, yet finding themselves trapped in a man’s world.

Chevalier wonderfully evokes the atmosphere of the early 19th century, when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein and the prejudices of class and gender, restrictions on women and the exclusivity and antagonism of the scientific community were the norm.

Two women in the small Dorset seaside town of Lyme Regis, visited by Jane Austen in 1804, become great friends despite the gossip and spite of curious neighbours.

Elizabeth Philpot is an intelligent, middle-class spinster for whom “fossils were to be her passion”, while Mary Anning, a poor working-class girl, spends her days hunting for ‘curios’. But their relationship becomes fraught with heartache when they fall for the same man, the handsome Colonel Birch. Nonetheless, the resilience of their love and mutual loyalty overcomes their differences.

The shifting perspectives of these two passionate women shape the novel. The story alternates between the two narrators. Elizabeth judges others by their features: she sees Mary as leading “with her eyes” while she herself leads “with her hands”.

Their language, too, differentiates them: Elizabeth, the middle-class intellectual, uses scientific words like ammonites and bivalves while plain Mary, “knowing she would never be a lady”, talks of verterberries and crocs.

Yet they are united by their search, in all weathers, for precious fossils along the windswept coastline, with its dangerous cliffs, landslides, storms and falling rocks.

In her postscript, Chevalier tells us that Remarkable Creatures is a work of fiction, “but many of the people existed, and events … did take place”, reminding us of her book Girl With a Pearl Earring, which also captures a particular moment.