Mmph. I really did want to like this more than I did. I love this history of science; I really enjoyed the setting and characters of this book. I learned about Mary Anning discovering the plesiosaurus in my dinosaur books when I was little. A novel about her and Elizabeth Philpot in Lime Regis (starting the same year that Jane Austen was there and actually visited Mary's father for some carpentry repair on her traveling trunk, according to the author's note)--that should vve great! And it was good. Well-written. I read it in a day.

But it gets a little frustrating that historical fiction set in ye olden dayes must necessarily recapitulate the exact conversations that people were having then, as a nod to historical accuracy. Like, yes, of course people back in 1805 had difficulty with ideas of evolution and extinct species and the age of the earth. Yes, they probably did struggle to reconcile it with the bible. I'm sure. I believe that those conversations happened. But they are boring, because those debates are no longer current, and I'm not interested in hearing people have them even in a historical book. 

The book did, I think, as good a job as it could with the sexism of the era, in large part because it engaged with it on a deeper level than 'Argh, I r a sciencer why no men listen?' It would have been so easy and lazy to have Mary and Elizabeth bond furiously over their desire to engage with scientific society and be shut out from it, and have proto-feminism and proto-suffragette sympathies. But instead of this, it engaged with the whole issue of sex in science in a much mroe interesting way. Men did listen to Mary Anning, because they saw that she could help them find fossils, and they bought fossils from her, and commissioned work from her, and paid her. It became her livelihood--but it also caused difficulties for her reputation in town, because she spent so long on beaches with unmarried men. And because of issues of class and education--not just sex--she was forbidden from fully participating in the world of science, and indeed was refused recognition for her work until Elizabeth Philpot--who at least had the advantages of class and education--stepped in. And, indeed, in many cases it was not that the men were unwilling to credit Mary, or pay her for her work. They weren't malicious; just oblivious to the fact that she couldn't afford to buy coal for the winter if they did not pay her for her time. Some of the difficulties facing women sprang from malice, to be sure, but what this book does so well his highlight how much more of it is simply negligent ignorance, stemming as much from class as from sexism.

And then it goes and makes Elizabeth and Mary fight over a man, for fuck's sake. Because women can't just be friends and support each other; they have to fight over men. Goddamnit, the book was doing so well, and then it pulled this kind of crap on me. Argh. Do better, Tracy Chevalier!