The focus of Joan Thomas's historical fiction in Curiosity is the life of Mary Anning. Mary Anning(1799-1847) was a self-educated paleontologist & fossil collector from Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic Coast in the South West of Dorset in England.


Portrait of Mary Anning by Henry De la Beche

With her brother, when she was 11 years old, Mary found the first complete Ichthyosaur. During her lifetime she collected, identified and sold many fossils, among them: skeletons of more ichthyosaurs, a long-necked Plesiosaurus (aka the ‘sea-dragon’) and a Pterodactylus (aka ‘flying-dragon’).


Anning's spectacular marine finds and her contribution to scientific thought challenged her contemporaries' biblical interpretations of the story of creation. Her specimens were important early finds in the fields of what would later become known as paleontology, geology and evolutionary biology.

Thomas' book was rumoured to be more fully realized than Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures, another work of historical fiction that imagines what Anning's life might have been like. Both books provide fascinating looks into a woman, time, and place that have each played an incredibly important role in scientific thought. Curiosity definitely satisfies in the way it explores the relationship between scientists and theories of the time.

Joan Thomas's Mary Anning is quite a different person than Tracy Chevalier's in Remarkable Creatures. Not much is truly known for certain of Mary Anning's romantic relationships (if any). Each author puts forward a different male love interest for Anning, readers will have to determine for themselves if either is believable or likely!

What both authors are certain about is that Anning undoubtedly faced many challenges in her childhood and early twenties because of her family's poverty. Thomas clearly respects Mary Anning and tries to understand and illustrate the circumstances of her life.

The child mortality rate of the time was frightening. To put it in perspective, Paul Revere had 17 children -the last one in 1789, a mere ten years before Mary Anning was born. Of Revere’s children, only 12 lived to adulthood -he lost eight children, the same as Mary’s parents. But where 70% of the Revere children survived to adulthood, only only 20% of The Anning children lived.

For today's readers, child mortality rates like these and their toll on the family, and mothers in particular, are almost impossible to personally imagine. Thomas does an excellent job of presenting Mary Anning simply and remarkably living on as the sole surviving daughter of a couple who'd lost eight of their ten children

She writes: "The poor love life as passionately as the rich do. Perhaps more, for the effort it takes to cling to it."

The perplexities of growing up in a small community that knows Mary's history of loss and witnesses her childhood as an idiosyncratic poor man's daughter are presented from the child's point of view in a way that introduces the reader slowly to Mary's character.

(view spoiler)[For example in an early scene Mary Anning's parents are unable to afford the rudimentary vaccinations offered locally on a payment basis, so her father argues w/her mother and vaccinates his children on a nearby farm taking live cowpox directly from an dairyman's infected child. The mother cries over this, but the father goes ahead with it anyway. Mary's only doubt is whether she would have rather had her vaccine from "a livelier species than a cow -a fox or a magpie!" (hide spoiler)]


Annie Alexander
A favorite lady fossilist and collector's bio of mine is: On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West. Alexander and her partner, Louise Kellogg, collected with vigour and determination. As with Anning, their specimens eventually spoke for them as their life's work, more than their writings or any kind of memoir.

The scientific contributions of women like Anning, her contemporary Elizabeth Philpot, (and just 50 years later, Alexander in the US) were known and to a certain extent tolerated (even eventually accepted during their lives) because of their notoriety and small numbers, but also because of the way collections house specimens.

In the end once a specimen is identified and accessioned, scientists may argue over its similarity or difference to other specimens, but as that conversation heats up, it is the specimen and its identification (not the collector) that becomes the subject of the debate. Anning, Philpot, and Alexander all participated in science by their very act of collecting, whether they were within or without the academy, part of that scholarly debate or not.