Tracy Chevalier has a habit of placing books of fiction within some historical context, and then spinning a yarn around that time or place or person. I have very much enjoyed her gift for it--I have read other attempts by other authors that I have not liked as much or at all, but she speaks to me. This book is set in England in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is after Captain Cook and Joseph Banks have returned from the South Pacific with all their tales of the tropics and specimens to back those stories up, but it is before Darwin sails around South America and changes the world in the middle of the 19th century with 'Origin of the Species'.
Our heroine is Mary Apping, a young woman who has lived on the coast of England all her life and collected things from the beach--things that no one can rightly explain. The remains of things that no one has ever seen. She finds them by the dozens when others cannot find even, one and she becomes widely known for this, her family has a shop that sells her finds, and they eek out a meager living from her talents.
Mary finds dinosaur skeletons--her early finds are amongst the finest specimens known at the time, and she receives very modest recognition for her talents, because it is at a time when men did not think much of a woman's capabilities. The only woman I can think of who was a well known scientist in Mary Apping's life time was Caroline Hershel, who was an accomplished astronomer and mapper of the heavens, along with her brother Wilhem, when Mary was born. The story that Chevalier weaves is fictional, but engaging and well worth taking some time to think about and remember Apping's accomplishments.
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