BKMT READING GUIDES
Curiosity
by Joan Thomas
Paperback : 416 pages
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More than 40 years before the publication ...
Introduction
Award-winning novelist Joan Thomas blends fact and fiction, passion and science in this stunning novel set in 19th-century Lyme Regis, England the seaside town that is the setting of both The French Lieutenant's Woman and Jane Austen's Persuasion.
More than 40 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, 12-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker's daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, and spent a year chipping it from the soft cliffs near Lyme Regis. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this incredible woman, perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day.
Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent back in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an extraordinary discovery "a giant fossil" he meets a young woman unlike anyone he has ever met?
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt
From Chapter 24Mary was ignorant of her own true self when she walked Miss Whyte up the hill to Aveline House, carrying the lady’s satchel. She understood fully only the day she saw them coming up Marine Parade from the Cobb, Miss Whyte in a rose-coloured wrap and pale orange gloves. Then she realized, not merely that he was lost to her, but that she was a feeble-brained stunpoll. She’d nurtured a hope so secret it had been secret to her own self. It was out in the open now, like debris dropped on the foreshore when the tide withdraws. How monstrous it was—it had no place in this world. And then rage seized her, and in her mind she went over all the things he had done—his hanging around the curiosity table and using speech laden with compliments, as though he could elevate her by his very manner of addressing her; his curious questions; his parading himself, a barefoot boy who lived with blackamoors; his talk about subjects decent common folk shut their ears to; his following her down alone to the shore, spreading her hair on the sand with tender hands. She put all these things on a scale and weighed them up against her lunatic hope. And then it was clear to her that she was not mad, but that he certainly was. ... view entire excerpt...
Discussion Questions
1. As a child Mary Anning was vaccinated with cow pox. Why was this important in the novel?2. What moved you most about the dilemmas Mary Anning faced in her life?
3. What draws Henry De la Beche to Mary Anning? Which of them has more to offer the other?
4. How did Henry’s unusual childhood shape the youth, and then the man, he became?
5. Because of Mary Anning’s fossil finds, the characters in Curiosity struggle to understand the natural world and time differently. Why is it so hard for them to change?
6. Curiosity begins in 1809, the year Charles Darwin was born, and ends in 1824. Which character in Curiosity comes closest to anticipating Darwin’s work?
7. A special question for readers who have read Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures: As a novelist, Tracy Chevalier had a different theory of which gentleman Mary Anning may have fallen in love with. How does having a different love-interest reshape Mary’s story? What other differences do you see in the way these two novelists have interpreted historical fact?
8. A special question for readers who have read John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman: John Fowles was very interested in Mary Anning and said that he saw her as the secret heroine of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. What do you think he meant?
Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
Note from the author:
I was galvanized when I read about a young girl who dug a huge fossil out of the beach in pre-Darwin England and changed the way people saw the world. Mary Anning was marginalized by sex and class, but she formed an attachment to one of the gentleman she worked with. No one knows who he was. What an irresistible invitation to a novelist—especially when history presents a fascinating candidate in the person of Henry De la Beche, a charming, irreverent man with his own moral dilemmas to face.
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